The Second Wave by Michael Tod Read Free Book Online

provide a meal for days, Blood stayed in the church, taking a roosting peahen occasionally and seldom venturing out.
    The squirrels soon began to believe that the alarm must have been a product of Thizle’s imagination, despite the disappearance of Ex-King Willow and the ex-zervant Bug, and relaxed their guard.
    A week later the elderly ex-zervants, Caterpillar and Beetle, drawn by an urge to get thoroughly ruddled again, sloped off unnoticed to the leaf-pile in the Zwamp.
    Beetle ate first and was enjoying the drowsy, warm feelings when he saw Caterpillar, who had just dug himself a ruddled sloe from deep amongst the steaming leaves, staring past him.  Fear was showing in his stance and in the look in his eyes.  Beetle froze.  Caterpillar started to move backwards, still with his eyes fixed on something behind Beetle, whose neck-fur was now rising and his tail-tip swishing uncontrollably to left and right.
    Beetle turned fearfully to look over his shoulder, caught a glimpse of sharp white teeth above a white-furred chest and tried to leap for a tree, but fell in a heap as his limbs seemed to tangle with one another.  Then he felt the teeth biting deep into his neck.
    Caterpillar dropped the sloe he was holding without even a taste and, turning, abandoned his old ruddling friend to his fate and raced off through the trees to Beech Valley, where he described how Beetle had been killed in such vivid detail that even Chestnut could not doubt him.
    There was a pine marten loose on their island!
     
     
     

 
    CHAPTER NINE
     
    Next to be taken was a youngster, Hornbeam the Disobedient, who, living up to his tag, had wandered off in search of his favourite fungus and did not come back.  His distraught mother pleaded for a search party to go and find him. Four squirrels, led by Chestnut, set out cautiously, to return shortly with a limp red tail.
    The Council was meeting twice a day trying to come up with ideas for defence, but no useful suggestions were forthcoming until Tansy the Wistful reminded the squirrels of the Woodstock, the magical vine-strangled stick with which her friend Marguerite had accidentally killed an aged Royal the previous year.  Marguerite had had it with her when she left Ourland and it must surely be with her now at the Blue Pool.
    ‘If we could get it here, we could use it to kill the pine marten and we’d all be safe again,’ she said.
    Her listeners chattered with relief.  The Woodstock.  Of course, why hadn’t they thought of that?
    Then reality returned.  Some squirrel, or squirrels, would have to get to the Mainland, journey to the Blue Pool, collect the Woodstock – if it was in fact there and still worked – learn how to use it and get it back again to Ourland.  The whole idea was impossible.  They all sat in silence again, tails drooping with disappointment.
    ‘Perhaps we could find another Woodstock on the beach,’ said Heather Treetops hopefully.  Then, realising how unlikely this would be, she added, ‘Or perhaps we could make one.  I sort of remember what it looked like.’
    Over the next two days, in the protection of watchful pickets, the squirrels looked for suitable fallen branches and pieces of driftwood.  Using their teeth, they tried to recreate the twisted spiral they knew as a Woodstock.  Some said that the twist ran one way and some said it ran the other, and several ‘Woodstocks’ were made – but none had the smooth lines of the original or seemed to hold any feeling of hidden power.
    ‘I think it was Marguerite’s numbers that made it work,’ said Oak.  ‘Does anyone remember how they looked?’
    Her practice scratches on the sand had long since washed away, and the odd pieces of driftwood on which numbers had been cut by her teeth had floated off to other shores.
    Clover recalled that Marguerite had cut numbers in the living bark of some birch trees, but these birches were too near the church where the marten’s den was thought to be.  Another