Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales (5 page)

“Show me how to tell if it’s hot enough,” said Gerbil.

“Just climb inside,” said Granny Porky nastily. She thought she could fling the oven door closed and have juicy gerbil legs for her party, too.

“I can’t climb,” said Gerbil. “My limbs are aching from all the housework. I have a pinched nerve in my spine.”

“You simpleton,” snapped Granny Porky. “It isn’t hard! Just lean over and crawl in!”

“Show me,” said Gerbil.

“Beware,” called the slug, but Hamster started singing the national anthem just then to drown out the slug’s warning. Granny Porky hobbled across the kitchen floor, naked of all her bristles and wearing nothing but a filthy old apron. She climbed into the oven and said, “See, you foolish animal, now do you see what I mean?”

“Now I see what you mean, you old beast,” shouted Gerbil, and she slammed the oven door shut and locked it.

And that was the end of Granny Porky. Except for her quills.

Unfortunately, the key to the hamster wheel had burned up and melted down inside the oven, and Gerbil didn’t know how to open the cage. But after three days of chewing, she managed at least to break the wheel free from the wall. Then she opened the door and gave the wheel a push.

Hamster raced the cage proudly out the door and down the path. With a glorious crunch, he ran over the slug, who in three whole days of traveling had only made it to the bottom of the garden.

Gerbil took up Granny Porky’s pincushion—very gently, very carefully. She also helped herself to several of the better cookbooks, the reading of which she had grown fond.

With Hamster rolling in his wheel beside her, they set off through the woods. After many mishaps and wrong turns, they finally made it back to the riverbank where they had last seen their father.

And there he was! He hadn’t died of the stink attack! However, Skunk had fed him on nothing but bits of predigested skunk cabbage, and he’d lost a lot of weight. So he wasn’t looking his best.

But he was so delighted to see his children again that he felt better at once. With his strong beaver teeth he gnawed through the lock of the hamster cage.

Then Hamster and Gerbil told him how Skunk had tried to lose them in the forest, hoping they would starve to death. “She’s an evil thing,” said Papa Beaver. “The world would be better rid of her.”

So they devised a plan. They found some choice bits of skunk cabbage and marinated it in a paste made of mold, mildew, and mayonnaise. They worked on it in secret, and when it was ready, they rolled it like a ball, like a special cocktail snack, and put it in the hamster wheel.

Then they rolled the hamster wheel onto the top of the bluff overlooking the river.

When it was all ready, Hamster and Gerbil hid behind a clump of dandelions. “Oh darling,” Papa Beaver called, “I’ve made you a special treat.”

“It better be good, you worthless lump of beaver!” screamed Skunk, coming out of the cave. “I don’t know why I ever bothered to marry you anyway! You’ve been nothing but trouble since the moment we met! Marry in haste, repent in leisure! At least those annoying little kids of yours are dead! That’s the only fun I ever got out of this marriage!”

“I put your food in that private little dining room,” said Papa Beaver. “That way no one else will steal it.”

“Now you’re thinking,” said Skunk. “This meal stinks to high heaven. You’re finally learning to cook the way I like it.”

“I hope you like
this
,” said Papa Beaver.

Skunk climbed into the hamster wheel. It was a tight fit, but she settled down to nibble at her meal. When her back was turned, Papa Beaver slammed the door of the hamster wheel behind her.

“What did you do that for, you buck-toothed bozo?” yelled Skunk.

“A little more privacy,” said Papa Beaver.

She ate a little more. Suddenly she began to scream. Her mouth was filled with porcupine quills, because the smelly food was wrapped around the pincushion bristly with Granny Porky’s spikes.

“Doctor! Dentist! Yowza-dowza!” she wailed. “Will no one help me?” Just then Hamster and Gerbil scampered up and gave the hamster wheel a little push.

“You are still alive! You twerps!” cried Skunk. She tried to hose them with her worst chemical-weapon spray, but her aim was poor. Her tail was curled around herself, and she ended up spritzing herself.

The hamster wheel picked up speed and pitched over the bluff into the river. Skunk was never seen again, but a cloud of skunk-smog hung over the riverbank for a month.

Papa Beaver and his beloved children began immediately to build themselves a new beaver dam. Even though they still missed Mama Beaver, they were happy being back together.

And when Papa Beaver eventually fell in love with a cute vixen from across the valley, Hamster and Gerbil liked her quite a bit too.

They got together and combed through the cookbooks and settled on some fancy items to prepare for the wedding feast. At first they were sorely tempted to try a huge roast of porcupine, but that seemed a bit too mean, even under the circumstances. They settled on a board of very fancy stinky cheeses. The aroma made everyone think of Skunk, and how nice it was that she had floated far away.

SO WHAT AND THE SEVEN GIRAFFES

O
ne day the king of the baboons said, “I want a child.”

“And how does that make you feel?” asked the queen.

“I am so sad,” said the king.

“I feel your pain,” said the queen.

“Thank you for caring,” said the king.

“Thank you for sharing,” said the queen.

Yes, the king and queen were sad, and they heard what each other was saying, and they knew where each other was coming from. They had a perfect marriage, in fact. When the queen filled out a questionnaire called “How Is Your Marriage?” in the back of
Baboons’ Home
Journal
, her score was great. Her marriage was healthy. It was in such perfect health that she wrote a letter to the editor to ask, “So why am I not pregnant?”

“Sew yourself a little cross-stitch motto,” the editor wrote back. “If you prick your finger on the needle and the blood comes out, make a wish.”

The queen didn’t care much for sewing. But dutifully she got a needle and thread and began to stitch a motto on a piece of cloth. She was going to make a little sign saying BABY ON

BOARD and wear it like an apron if she got pregnant. Then she pricked her thumb and a drop of blood came out. “I wish I could have a baby,” she cried. “I wish my thumb didn’t hurt so much! I hope I don’t get blood poisoning! Just because I have to sew this thing!”

“Sew what?” said the king, coming in.

She showed him the sampler, but all it said so far was BABY.

A couple of weeks later, the queen realized that she was pregnant.

“You look radiant,” said the king fondly.

“I have got a whoopsy tummy,” said the queen, and proved it.

“I feel your pain,” said the king.

“That’s what
you
think,” said the queen. “Can you get blood poisoning from a needle?”

“Maybe,” said the king. “I’m here for you. Let me share.”

“I would if I could,” said the queen. “My blue behind, can this monster in here kick or what?”

“Try being sweet and understanding to it,” said the king.

The queen put her hand on her swelling stomach and patted it. “I’m there for you,” she said to the baby inside.

From inside, the baby kicked so hard that the queen got a lump on her palm the size of a meatball.

The king put his ear to the queen’s stomach. “I’ll spend a little quality time with my child,” he said. “Hi there, child of mine. I hear where you’re coming from.” Inside the queen the baby began to screech and fuss so loudly that the king went almost completely deaf. “How can you stand that noise, my dear?” he asked his wife.

But his wife didn’t hear what he was saying because she had put earplugs in her ears.

Finally the queen gave birth to a cunning little boy chimpanzee. The chimp wriggled in her arms like a wrinkling piece of bacon. “I love you,” said the queen fondly.

“So what?” said the chimp.

The queen took her earplugs out. “Did I see your lips move? Can you talk? King, come listen to this!”

But the king didn’t hear her. He was in the royal garage, busy making a hearing trumpet out of a conch shell.

The queen didn’t feel so hot. “I hoped and prayed for you my whole life long,” she murmured to her baby. “I’m so thrilled you’re here.”

“So what?” said the chimp.

The queen was so surprised that her newborn baby could talk that she died of happiness.

Or maybe it was shock. Or blood poisoning.

The king mourned and vowed to raise his son in the paths of niceness. But everybody called the chimp by the name of So What, because that was the main thing that he said.

So What was a little devil. He jumped on his father’s hearing trumpets and smashed them. So his father the king wandered around in a constant state of baboon deafness. He couldn’t hear how rude his son was. He loved his son.

Eventually the king got married again, this time to a body-building gorilla from the suburbs. The new queen was fond of So What for about two minutes. Then she got over it.

“You and I are going to get along or I’ll break your little neck,” she told him.

“So what?” said So What.

“So then you’ll have to wear a neck brace like a huge peppermint LifeSaver.”

“So what?”

“Say another word, So What, and so help me…”

“So help you what?” he said.

The gorilla queen threw a lamp across the room. She didn’t throw it at So What. She just threw it to release a little nervous energy. So What scampered away, laughing wickedly.

In the days to come So What delighted in goading his stepmother into throwing lamps.

She became quite good at it. Soon, if she got a decent head of steam up, she could heave a standing floor lamp a distance of a hundred fifty feet.

But So What got on her nerves, and the king was lost in a fog of permanent deafness. He was constantly tooling conch shells into new hearing aids that So What stomped on. Between the smashing of lamps and the stomping on conch shells, it was one noisy castle.

Finally the gorilla queen had had enough. She wrote a letter to the editor of
Baboons’

Home Journal
and asked for advice. The editor printed her letter (but in order to protect her privacy, changed her name from “Gorilla Queen” to “Worried in the Royal Castle”). The editor suggested hiring a local hunter to take the little troublemaker out into the woods, kill him, and cut his heart out and bring it back. “Check last month’s issue for delicious recipes, at just pennies a serving!” she concluded.

The gorilla hired a hunter. He was a human being. Humans are good at hunting. But when the human being got So What to the clearing in the forest, So What fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness. “Please don’t kill me,” he cried. “I can’t help being nasty. It’s the way I am.”

“Everyone can help how they are,” said the hunter firmly. But some humans are good at kindness as well as hunting. This hunter was one of those. He took pity on the little chimp and said, “Run for your life, So What, for that gorilla stepmother of yours doesn’t put up with any nonsense. If she finds I haven’t killed you, she’ll come after you and throw a lamp at you or something. One of these days the lamp will still be plugged in and you’ll get electrocuted. Run, run, I say, and I’ll buy a piece of chicken liver in the supermarket on the way home and tell her it’s your heart.”

“You would do that for me?” said So What.

“Humans are good at lying,” said the hunter. “Besides, a chicken liver is a tiny thing, and that’s about how big your heart is so far. I hope you learn some manners, my boy. If you were my chimp, I’d put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.”

“So what,” said the chimp.

“So long,” said the hunter, and he made good his promise. When the queen saw the chicken liver lying in a little Styrofoam carton, she cooked it up with onions and sherry and ate it for a snack. Then she went to tell her husband that their little boy seemed to have run away. The king got a flashlight and went to hunt in the hedges, but he couldn’t find his boy.