Digger Field by Damian Davis Read Free Book Online Page A

spew.’
    ‘No way,’ Wrigs laughed.
    ‘And Mum said we’re not allowed to cook again when she’s not home.’
    ‘That sucks.’
    ‘I think I’m out of ideas,’ I said.
    Just then Dean opened our front gate and walked up the steps to the verandah. He had something trapped between his hands.
    ‘Do you know what this is?’ Dean opened his hands and showed us what he’d caught.
    ‘A cicada,’ Wrigs said. ‘ Dur! ’
    ‘Not any cicada,’ Dean said. ‘A Black Prince cicada. I just caught it as I was coming up the street.’
    If there is a sound of summer, it’s the highpitched squeal made by millions of cicadas all singing at once. Cicadas are the best insects of all. Every November you start to notice little holes in the ground. It looks like someone has walked over all the grass in footy boots and the studs have dug in. Baby cicadas crawl out of the holes, climb trees, shed their skins and then start squealing.
    There’s Greengrocers, Floury Bakers, Yellow Mondays, Double Drummers and rarest of all, Black Princes. The Prince is black all over, except for its silver wings.
    ‘Yeah, but what’s the big deal?’ I said.
    ‘You can sell Black Princes to the chemist.’
    ‘Bull,’ said Wrigs.
    ‘No, dead set,’ Dean said. ‘I made eighty bucks last year. Black Princes have got something in them that the chemists put in medicine. You get two bucks for males and five bucks for females.’
    ‘How come we’ve never heard of this before?’ I said.
    ‘Because you’re stupid. And there was no way I was going to tell you. I didn’t want you sprogs getting to them before me.’
    ‘So why are you telling us now?’ I asked him.
    ‘I haven’t got time this year. But I thought if I give you this one, you can give me the five bucks. Then you can get it back from the chemist.’
    ‘We’ll give you three bucks,’ said Wrigs.
    Dean thought for a moment, then said, ‘Okay. Give me the cash.’
    ‘You’ll have to wait until we get the money from the chemist,’ Wrigs said.
    ‘I want four dollars then,’ said Dean.
    ‘Okay, but we’re going to find heaps more before we go,’ I said.
    Excellent, if Dean could make eighty dollars selling cicadas when he hardly ever gets off his bum, we’d have the tinnie by the end of the week.
    Pensdale hasn’t got a lot of trees, but the ones we do have are huge, boring gums. They are almost impossible to climb because the branches are so high and the trunks are really smooth.
    It was slow going. We had to get Dad’s ladder from the garage and drag it with us up and down the street.
    And by the time we saw a cicada, put the ladder up, and then climbed the ladder, it had usually flown away.
    It took us two hours to find three Black Princes, and one of those managed to escape from the shoebox we were keeping them in.
    We were about to give up when we spotted a goldmine. In the really tall trees just in front of Ms Burke’s place were twenty Black Princes all sitting together. They were on a branch about four metres up the tree. It was going to be pretty hard to get to them.
    The ladder only reached a branch a bit below the one where they were. So I climbed onto that branch and pulled myself up to the higher branch.
    Wrigs climbed onto the lower branch and I passed the cicadas down to him as I caught them. Every time I caught one, Wriggler had to climb back down the ladder and put the cicada in the shoebox at the foot of the trunk.
    We had caught nine more cicadas when Dean wandered up the street. He didn’t say anything, just lingered, like he was waiting for something. Wrigs and I were worried. No one trusts Dean.
    When Wrigs had climbed up onto my branch so I could pass him a cicada, Dean called out, ‘Hey, suckers.’
    He pushed the ladder over. Wrigs and I were both stuck up the tree.
    Then he picked up our box of Black Princes and said, ‘Look what someone left here.’
    He looked around, pretending he didn’t know whose box it was.
    Wriggler’s face went so