Where Cuckoos Call by Des Hunt Read Free Book Online

by the tail and held it over her mouth. She gulped at it, chomped a couple of times, and then spat it out. I tried again, with the same result.
    This puzzled me. I had been so sure she would have liked the mealworms. They were fleshy and wriggly, what else would she want? Then it occurred to me that I might be giving them to her the wrong way around. So, I picked up a mealworm by its head and offered it tail-first. She chomped and swallowed—and a moment later spewed it all up.
    I sat on my bed thinking about how I was going to feed her, and what I could possibly do with two thousand unwanted mealworms. She still had a lot of growing to do and there was no way I could collect all the insects she would need. The mealworms had to be the answer. Somehow, I needed to make them more attractive.
    Then I had a brainwave: what if the heads were the problem? They were hard and spiky; maybe they upset her throat. The answer was to remove the heads.
    So, I pulled the head off one—only a bit of gut came with it. The rest of the body looked just like a maggot. With it still wriggling, I offered it to Bigmouth. It disappeared down her throat. I waited a while, expecting it to come up again. It didn’t. Instead, she opened her beak and squawked for another. She took another five before presenting me with a bag of droppings and settling down to sleep. A solution had been found. I was not going to have two thousand mealworms lying around my bedroom. I was just going to have the heads of two thousand mealworms.
    Over those days I had been working with the tractor shifting the driftwood. At first I’d tried to use the front-end loader, but Inever got the hang of the levers. Instead, I used a chain to haul the logs around. I had to get the wall finished before the birds were ready to lay again.
    Peg was always with me, and most days I took Jake as well. He needed the exercise and, as there were no nests, he couldn’t do too much harm. That dog could never rest. He had to be doing something all the time: chasing the tractor, snapping at the logs, running around with sticks in his mouth—to him everything was fun. I found I was beginning to like him.
    After four days I had a wall from the end of the trees to the mouth of the estuary. You would have to be real thick not to get the message. Yet, just in case, I decided to nail my three hand-painted signs to the wall:
KEEP OFF THE SPIT
    This is where the birds breed.
    By order,
    Ben Mansfield
    Peg and I were standing back admiring our work when I heard the roar of bikes coming along the beach. The bikers were back. Immediately I felt panicky. I didn’t know whether I could stand another lot of their bullying. But what could I do? I couldn’t get back to Treetops in time. The best thing was to get to the other side of the wall. That way I could buy a bit of time.
    It wasn’t easy climbing over the logs, as there were plenty of gaps to trap a leg if I slipped. When I was over, I called to Peg. ‘Here, Peg. Come on girl, get over here.’
    She hesitated, as if unsure of what I wanted.
    ‘Here, Peg!’ I yelled, more urgently. ‘Come here!’
    But it was too late. Yamaha was already there. As he approached he put out a leg so that he would hit her as he passed. His foot smashed into her back, tumbling her overinto the sand. Then Red Honda was onto her and running over her tail. Blue Honda followed, spraying sand into her face as he went.
    When they reached the end of the beach they regrouped getting ready for the next attack. I didn’t wait. If they did it again, they would kill her. I scrambled over the barrier and threw myself on top of her. I didn’t think about what I was doing, I only knew that I had to protect her.
    The first biker zoomed past without hitting. The second sprayed us with sand, but the third stopped and placed a boot in the middle of my back. I looked up and saw it was Yamaha. Soon the other two were back, pushing their front wheels against us.
    ‘So, Bird Boy,