Devils in Danger, page 5
One afternoon, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I leant over and opened the drawer of my bedside table where an old notebook was wedged at the back. Maybe I would start that journal, like Dad suggested. If I wrote down everything about Tasmanian devils, the waiting might not be so hard.
I grabbed my stuffed echidna from my toy shelf and propped him beside the notebook while I dug around for a pencil and a sharpener.
‘How should I start?’ I asked, chewing the end of the pencil while I thought. ‘Definitely not Dear Diary and absolutely not Hello, it’s me.’ I found a fresh page and poised the pencil above it. ‘How about Day One: Noises?’ I said as I began to write.
Then I stopped and looked at my entry. ‘Is that how you spell noise?’ I quickly rubbed out the word, writing it again with the ‘o’ and ‘i’ around the other way. That didn’t look right either, so I rubbed out the whole sentence, making such an ugly hole that I ripped out the entire page and scrunched it into a ball.
I was sure my echidna wasn’t impressed.
‘What?’ I protested. His button eyes almost glinted, like he was laughing, so I turned him to face the wall.
‘Day One: Screeching noises, paw prints, a strange wiry poo.’ I looked back on my clumsy letters – all collapsed into each other as if five-year-old Josh had dashed them off in a hurry. I wanted to slam the notebook shut and shove it back into my drawer, but I took a deep breath and forced myself to keep going. It didn’t have to be perfect. I just had to write down as much as I could. Everything April had told me, plus any observations I had made.
Once I’d done that, I jumped on to the laptop and looked up what Tasmanian devils ate and where they lived, all the things Miss Bredlow made us do for school. Before I knew it, my journal began to fill.
One Friday afternoon, with Mum at an appointment in Hobart and Dad home early from work, I’d just checked the trap and was back in my room, writing in my journal. I’d placed my stuffed koala by my side and was halfway through my entry, when a familiar ute pulled up. April hopped down from the driver’s seat, her heavy work boots and navy all-in-one overalls completely covered in mud.
‘Afternoon!’ she called, reaching for her laptop on the passenger seat.
Dad, who’d been perched up a ladder cleaning the gutters, leapt down and held out his hand. ‘G’day. I’m Darren, Killarney’s dad. You must be the famous professor?’ He was oblivious to the fact he had a big dusty cobweb stuck to the back of his head. The leaves caught in it dangled and bobbed as he talked.
April gave a dismissive sniff. ‘I don’t know about famous. But good to meet you.’ She gave Dad’s hand a very firm shake. ‘No sign of our critter yet?’
Dad shook his head, which made the cobweb on his head bob even more. I bit my lip, trying not to giggle. I couldn’t giggle in front of April. She was way too serious for that.
‘Righto,’ said Dad, glancing strangely at me as I tried not to stare at the ridiculous web. ‘Got time for a quick cuppa? No scones today, I’m afraid.’
‘Sure. Thanks.’
I showed April my journal while she sipped her coffee and told her how, although we’d heard screams at night, we hadn’t seen any sign of the Tasmanian devil all week.
‘So what now?’ Dad asked.
‘Firstly, well done, Killarney. These notes are an excellent resource. Secondly, if it’s okay by you, Darren, I’ll freshen up the bait in the trap and keep checking it a little longer.’ April went to hand back my notebook, but accidentally sent my pencil, which had been wedged between the pages, tumbling between the broken floorboards. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said. ‘Now I’ve gone and lost it.’
‘No, you haven’t. I’ll get it.’
I ran outside and crawled below the house, wriggling towards the fingers of light to pluck the pencil from the dirt. I clutched it tightly and was sliding back out again when the trap caught my eye.
My heart stopped.
It was hard to tell without the torch, but …
‘April!’ I called as I squirmed back towards the daylight. ‘The trapdoor’s down!’
One quick sweep of April’s torch beam under the house confirmed it. ‘Don’t get too excited,’ she warned. ‘It might be a false alarm.’
I held the torch while Dad helped April pull out the white tube and lay it carefully on the lawn. April gathered rubber gloves, a hessian sack and a yellow bucket from her ute before showing Dad how to attach the opening of the hessian sack around the mouth of the tube. Then, once she’d slipped on her gloves, Dad held the sack in place while April tipped up the tube, bumping the contents down into the bag.
I jiggled my knees with excitement. It could just be a cat. Or a small wombat, like Noah said.
‘Okay,’ April said. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got.’
Chapter 10
I held my breath as April peeled down the side of the hessian sack to reveal a small body covered in coarse black fur. Its broad head reminded me of a bear’s head but smaller. Each tiny black eye was surrounded by a ring of brown skin, just like the skin on its rat-like muzzle, which housed clumps of long twitching whiskers and a handful of ugly scars.
My stomach flipped like a fish on a line as the creature began to struggle. But April remained completely calm. She slipped a strip of material over the animal’s eyes and, miraculously, once it was blindfolded, the critter lay still enough for April to inspect it.
‘A gorgeous Tasmanian devil!’ she announced, holding its mouth firmly shut with one of her gloved hands.
I grinned so hard it hurt. A little longer than a thirty-centimetre ruler, the devil’s body was coal black, with thin red ears and a line of white fur forming a collar around its neck.
‘You little beauty!’ declared Dad, thumping me excitedly on the back.
‘Well done, Killarney,’ April said, ‘for spotting her in the first place.’ She gently inspected the devil’s face, ears and eyes. ‘Look at her healthy teeth.’ April ran a gloved finger along the inside of the pink gums. ‘Forty-two of them and always growing. See?’
Dad and I peered closer. Several very white teeth glistened in the sunlight. Some were long and pointy, like a dog’s, whereas others were short. Every single one of them looked sharp.
Dad whistled. ‘Now that’s a set of laughing gear!’
April nodded in agreement. ‘Thanks to those teeth and these big jaws, this young lady can tear pretty much anything apart.’ She held the devil’s mouth open. ‘See here? She’s got four pairs of upper incisors and three pairs of lower incisors. That tells me she’s about three years old.’
I glanced at Dad. Was it him? Or the devil? A rotten pong, worse than any of Dad’s silent but deadlies, was virtually burning the hair from my nostrils.
April must have smelt it too. ‘Don’t worry, you get used to it. These guys are like skunks – they emit a terrible smell when they get scared. Not surprising, really. I wouldn’t like being yanked out of my home.’
April reached into the bucket and took out a small contraption like one of those handheld scanners at the supermarket. ‘I’ll just check her microchip, but I’m pretty sure this is Fern, a devil we released from our breeding program last year. It’s not often we get a devil with such a distinctive collar. Look, see?’
The white collar was only a few millimetres thick all the way around the devil’s neck, except at the chest where it formed a small heart shape, like a pendant.
April ran the scanner over the back of the devil’s neck, and when it let out a tiny beep, she peered at the number on the screen. ‘Yep, it’s definitely Fern,’ she said. ‘Raised in captivity and released only a few kilometres from here late last year. All part of the Save the Tasmanian Devil Program.’
Holding the devil’s mouth tightly, April carefully tipped little Fern upside down and ran her free hand over Fern’s soft belly. ‘A devil’s pouch opens to the rear,’ she said, gently using her fingers to check inside the small opening of skin. ‘Just like a wombat’s.’
Dad had broken his nose so many times during footy games he could only breathe through his mouth. Now, judging by how fast his noisy breaths were, he was just as excited as I was to see what was in the devil’s pouch.
‘Okay, so here we go …’ murmured April.
I gasped, squeezing Dad’s hand.
There, snuggled against their mother’s soft skin, lay two pink, hairless jellybean shapes.
‘That lost hoodie? The scarf under the house?’ said April. ‘I’d say our thief here has been making preparations for her imps.’
‘Imps?’ Dad frowned, like maybe imps was the name of a disease.
‘Devil babies are called joeys, Dad,’ I told him, ‘but when they’re really small, everyone calls them imps.’ After all my journal entries, my head was bursting with devil facts.
‘Exactly,’ April confirmed. ‘And these ones are only a few weeks old.’ The little jellybeans had slightly bulging eyes, still covered over in pink skin, and we watched as they suckled inside their mother’s pouch.
‘Don’t devils have about a hundred imps?’ I asked, remembering a fact from one of the internet sites.
‘Strewth!’ interrupted Dad. ‘A hundred? God help us!’
I aimed an elbow at Dad but missed while April released the soft fold of skin back over the babies. ‘Yes, female devils can give birth to a lot of imps, but not quite a hundred. More like between twenty and fifty.’ She pushed a strand of curly hair from her face with the inside of her wrist and continued her inspection. ‘But, since they only have four teats, most of those perish. The mother then carries the surviving two or three imps in her pouch, letting them suckle and grow for about three months, during which time she gets a den ready. But it’s not usually until about July or August when she actually starts denning, so …’
I raised my eyebrows. August was only three months away. Awesome!
‘Excuse my ignorance, but what’s denning?’ Dad asked.
‘That’s when the imps have left the pouch and the mother hides them in a safe spot for a few hours a day while she goes off to get food,’ I told him. ‘Isn’t it, April?’
‘Exactly,’ said April. ‘Which can get a little noisy, I’m afraid. Imps are super playful and they like to test out their voices and fighting skills on each other.’
‘Looking forward to that one,’ said Dad with a dramatic sigh. ‘So, when’s all this denning business likely to finish?’
‘If all goes well, Fern will wean her babies around December and they’ll lope off to find a territory of their own,’ said April. ‘But until weaning, they can’t survive without her.’
I couldn’t hide my delight. We were going to have devil babies right under our house!
Dad, however, was not so keen. ‘December?’ he groaned. ‘Good grief! You can’t take them off our hands before then? Before the raucous behaviour begins?’
April’s lips thinned, but only slightly.
‘Dad!’ I hissed. ‘You never move a denning mother unless you a have to.’ Another fact gathered from my research.
Dad raised his brows. ‘Crikey. So, we’ll have devil babies here, making a true-blue racket, right under our feet, for three or four months, but they’ll be off in time for Christmas?’
April nodded. ‘Exactly! Now, if you’ll excuse me for a sec, this can be a little tricky ...’ She bent over Fern to remove the material from her eyes, then quickly pulled the hessian bag up around her. I noticed that April only released her hold on Fern’s head once it was completely concealed in the sack and then she grasped the bag like a Santa sack, its end tightly closed. Fern didn’t struggle inside the darkened sack. She just stayed still as if she were asleep.
‘You okay for me to release her back under the house?’ April asked.
It was Dad who suggested that he and I wait inside, so we didn’t frighten little Fern. But I couldn’t help wishing I could watch her scampering free, hoping she’d nestle down in her new den and stay at our house forever.
‘Thanks, guys,’ said April after she’d packed away her stuff. ‘I’ll be back to check on Fern as often as I can, but meanwhile, you might like to spread the word. You have a very special guest in town and we need everyone to watch out for her. Can I leave that to you? To get the locals onside? It’s tough enough out there for our precious devils – it’s essential everyone understands.’
I nodded. We’d do anything to keep Fern and her family safe. I’d make sure of it.
Chapter 11
Dad and I talked about Fern and her babies all afternoon. By the time I explained April’s advice to Mum over dinner that night, my cheeks were sore from grinning. Dad looked pretty stoked too. A family of Tassie devils! I couldn’t think of anything better.
Mum, however, wasn’t too sure.
‘What about my clients?’ she complained. ‘What will they think about a Tassie devil living here, under their feet?’
I quickly finished my mouthful of potato to jump to Fern’s defence. ‘They’ll understand,’ I said. ‘Especially when we convince them that Fern won’t hurt them. I’ll make up posters with heaps of informative information, explaining how harmless devils are and why they should be protected. That will do the job.’
Dad grinned. ‘Informative information?’ he repeated. ‘Go, Killarney.’ But then he lost his smile. ‘What do you say?’ He glanced sideways at Mum. ‘People might be more accepting than you think.’
Mum shook her head. ‘Mmmm … maybe. But I’m not sure about posters.’
‘I’ll do them up on the computer,’ I promised. ‘To make them neat.’ Miss Bredlow said I had the worst handwriting ever. ‘I’ve found all these great sites—’
I didn’t get to finish because a loud screech filled the air. Instead of leaping up like we did the first time, Mum and Dad and I sat tight. We were getting used to blood-curdling interruptions.
‘Goodness,’ said Mum when the cry was done. ‘That was a loud one.’
‘That’s devils for you,’ said Dad. ‘Apparently, it’s going to get worse when she starts denning.’
Mum’s eyebrows rose. ‘Daz! You’ve become a walking encyclopedia.’
Dad laughed. ‘Not me. This one, over here.’ He turned and winked at me. ‘You should have heard all the facts Killarney was spouting earlier. Gave that professor a red-hot run for her money, didn’t you, poss? If Killarney puts all that in a poster, I’m sure everyone will understand.’
Mum didn’t argue. But she didn’t agree either. She concentrated on pushing peas onto her fork.
‘You can check my spelling,’ I suggested. Miss Bredlow said I was the most atrocious speller in class. Not that I cared. When did hairdressers ever need to spell? ‘Please, Mum, please? Fern needs a safe place to live.’
Mum finally gave up on her peas and lined the knife and fork together on her plate. ‘Look, I’m not sure about this, Killarney. People are funny. They might not like one wild devil hanging out around town, let alone a whole family of them. I mean, those screeches? They’re very, very loud.’
‘But lots of animals are loud,’ I argued. ‘Cockatoos, dogs and—’
‘Imagine,’ Mum interjected, ‘back in the early days, finding an animal that looked like a dog, but wasn’t a dog, that screamed and squealed and coughed and had fiery red ears, wide jaws and big sharp teeth. No wonder they called it a devil. Rumours like that can take a while to shake off.’
Despite my frustration, I had to agree. Fern’s mouth and teeth did seem pretty threatening. Not everyone would know that devils only gaped their jaws to scare opponents away. Poor Fern. She couldn’t help the way she looked. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just had sharp teeth and a scary-sounding cry.
‘I guess,’ I relented.
‘I keep thinking of your old pop,’ Mum continued. ‘He’d just about turn in his grave.’
I stabbed my fork into my last roast potato. ‘What does Pop have to do with this?’
‘Pop was a land owner, remember?’ Dad explained. ‘Back in the day, thousands of farmers like him blamed feisty Tassie devils for eating lambs. They spent ages trying to get rid of the critters, didn’t they, love?’
Mum nodded. ‘Exactly. You know, when Pop was a kid, they had a bounty on devils, just like the Tasmanian tiger. The reward was something like two shillings for a male and three for a female. I can only imagine what Pop would say if he knew we were trying to help them.’
I gasped. The Tasmanian tiger had become extinct because of a government bounty. Surely no-one would hurt a Tasmanian devil?
‘Well, you know, the good old days,’ Dad said when he saw the look on my face. ‘Lucky devils are protected now, but I think you’re right, Killarney. Educating people is the way to go.’
Mum’s lips thinned. ‘I don’t know, Daz. This is our house we’re talking about. My salon. My clients. Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ She looked at Dad, who looked at me. ‘I realise we need to raise awareness,’ Mum continued, ‘but can we keep it low-key? No posters? No fuss?’
‘But, Mum! How can I raise awareness if I don’t make a fuss? I promised April I’d help keep an eye out for Fern.’ I could feel my face going red. ‘Okay, so devils make noises! So what? We do too, with our cars and lawnmowers and noisy pets. So devils look frightening? Big deal. April said they’d never hurt us on purpose – they’re just trying to scare us away!’
Mum finally allowed herself a smile.
‘What?’ I snapped.
‘It’s just … well.’ She wiped a tiny spot of gravy from the corner of her mouth. ‘I’m impressed. You, finally motivated by something. It must be that journal of yours, helping you with all these facts.’
