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  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1990 by Fox Busters, Ltd.

  Illustrations copyright © 1990 by David Parkins

  Cover art copyright © 1998 by Jon Goodell

  Originally published in Great Britain by Penguin Children's Books in 1990.

  Published in hardcover by Crown Books for Young Readers in 1998.

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  ISBN 9780375-42313

  eBook ISBN 9781101938539

  Reprinted by arrangement with Crown Books for Young Readers

  Random House Children's Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Yearling Books You Will Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 An Old Fish’s Egg

  2 It’s a Monster

  3 Crusoe

  4 The Last Sardine

  5 In the Midst of Foes

  6 Home Is the Sailor

  7 A Bit Too Tame

  8 First Birthday

  9 Postie

  10 A Harebrained Plan

  11 A Ride in a Truck

  12 From a Local Newspaper

  1

  An Old Fish’s Egg

  IT WAS KIRSTIE who found it. It was lying just above the high-tide mark, a squarish package-shaped object, the color of seaweed, with a long tendril sticking out from each of its four corners.

  It was exactly the shape, in fact, of the mermaids’ purses, the little horny egg capsules of the dogfish, that were commonly washed up on the beach. But this one was the size of a large cookie tin!

  “Look what I’ve found!” shouted Kirstie. “Quick, come and look!”

  —

  In the small hours of March the 26th, 1930, a great storm struck the west coast of Scotland. The huge seas that it had whipped up smashed against the foot of the cliffs, and the tigerish tempest ran up the face of them and grabbed a small white house on the cliff top in its jaws.

  The house quivered and shook in the teeth of the wind, and Kirstie, waking in sudden fright, was sure that the roof would fly away.

  The noise of the storm was fearful. Angus will be terrified, thought Kirstie, and she jumped out of bed and ran to her little brother’s room next door. Her mother arrived at the same moment carrying an oil lamp, and by its light they could see that Angus was sleeping peacefully, sleeping like the baby he had been only a few years before. Outside, the thunder banged and the lightning flashed, the wind roared and the rain poured. Angus snored.

  “Back to bed, Kirstie,” said her mother. “I’ll stay here awhile in case he wakes.”

  “What about Grumble?” said Kirstie. “Is he all right?”

  Grumble was Mother’s father, who lived with them. When Kirstie was very small, she had heard Mother say angrily to him one day, “All you ever do is grumble, grumble,” and so she had thought that it was his name. It suited him. He came stumping along the corridor now, a big old man with a thick droopy mustache.

  “Can’t sleep a wink!” growled Grumble to his daughter and granddaughter, as though it were their fault. “Terrible weather! The Lord help sailors on a night like this!”

  Kirstie and Mother grinned at one another, for Kirstie’s father was a sailor, a merchant seaman. But at that moment his ship was, they knew, in quiet tropical waters, far from tonight’s frenzied Atlantic storm. At that moment there came a clap of thunder so close and so loud that Angus awoke and sat up in bed.

  “I heard a noise,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “It’s a storm, Angus,” said Kirstie. “A big storm.”

  “Going to blow the house down in a minute, I shouldn’t be surprised,” said Grumble.

  Just for a moment the wind dropped a little, and they could all clearly hear the crash of the breakers on the beach below. What would the sea throw up? Kirstie wondered. What would they find on the shoreline tomorrow? All of them loved beachcombing, even Grumble, though he pretended he didn’t, and a storm like this would leave lots of driftwood for them to collect.

  “Back to sleep, everyone,” Mother said, “and in the morning we’ll all go down and see what we can find.”

  “What d’you mean—in the morning?” said Grumble. “It’s morning now. I shan’t be able to drop off again, that’s for sure.”

  “You should count some sheep, Grumble,” said Angus. “That’s what I do.”

  “You can only count to ten,” Kirstie said.

  “I know. When I get to ten, I start again,” said Angus firmly, and he lay down and shut his eyes.

  Back in bed, Kirstie lay listening to the roar of the storm. She was as wide awake, she felt, as it was possible to be. And then—quite suddenly, it seemed—it was broad daylight.

  —

  Kirstie was too excited to eat much breakfast. The worst of the storm had passed now, the wind had dropped a bit, and Mother had promised that they would go down to the beach as soon as breakfast was finished and the dishes were washed up. It was the thought of what might be washed up on the shore that was exciting Kirstie. Beachcombing was such fun. You never knew what you might find. There were always lots of seaweed, and creatures like starfish and jellyfish and sea urchins, and loads of shells—whelks and cockles and cowries and razor shells. Then there was trash, like empty bottles (perhaps one might have a message in it from a castaway), and of course there was driftwood: wooden boxes and crates, planks and spars (once, even, a pair of oars), and the strange twisted shapes of branches and sometimes quite large limbs of trees, worn pale and smooth during their long voyages from goodness knows where. With such a storm as last night’s, who knows what they might find!

  “Eat up, Kirstie,” Mother said.

  Angus never needed to be given this order. Meals, in his view, were times for eating, not for talking. From sitting up at the table to getting down from it again, he only opened his mouth to put food in it.

  “What d’you think we’ll find, Angus?” said Kirstie. Angus stared at her, his jaw s chomping rhythmically. He did not answer.

  “Aren’t you excited?” Kirstie asked. Angus nodded placidly.

  “My egg’s not boiled enough,” said Grumble.

  They set out at last down the cliff path, Kirstie leading, carrying a little sack for putting things in, Mother following, holding Angus by the hand, and Grumble stumping along behind with a big sack and a length of cord to tie up bundles of driftwood. The seas were running very strongly still, and the breakers were huge but distant now, for the spring tide had ebbed. The pebbly beach was, as always, empty of people. The only living things on it were two seagulls picking at something that lay just above the high-tide mark. They flew up as Kirstie ran forward.

  “Come and look!” she shouted. “Quick!”

  “What is it?” Mother shouted back.

  “I don’t know. It looks like a giant mermaid’s purse!”

  Angus ran as fast as his short legs would allow. He looked critically at the object. The gulls could not have been at it long, for it seemed unharmed.

  “I didn’t know there were giant mermaids,” said Angus.

  “No dogfish could produce a thing like that,” said Mother when she and Grumble arrived. “Why, it must be twenty times as big as an ordinary mermaid’s purse. What do you think, Dad? Could it have come from some huge creature, like a basking shark?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Grumble. “We’re here to collect firewood, so let’s get on with it. This cold wind gets right in my bones.” He prodded the thing with his foot. “Whatever it is, it’s no use to us,” he said, and he stumped on, with Mother following.

  “It moved!” Kirstie said.

  “ ’Course it did,” said Angus. “Grumble kicked it.”

  “No, I mean after he’d kicked it—I saw the outside of it, the skin of it, move, I’m almost sure I did. It sort of trembled.”

  Angus peered at the giant mermaid’s purse. “It isn’t trembling now,” he said. “ ’Spect it’s dead. ’Spect he killed it.” He looked up at his sister and saw that she was upset at this thought. “It’s only an old fish’s egg,” he said. “Eggs don’t feel anything. Those ones that Mother boiled for breakfast, they didn’t feel nothing.”

  “They didn’t feel anything,” said Kirstie.

  Angus sighed. “I just told you that,” he said. “Sometimes I feel much older than you.

  “Well, you’re not,” said Kirstie quite sharply. “You’re three years younger. Hold my sack open for me.” She bent down and picked up the thing. It was heavy, as heavy indeed as a large cookie tin full of cookies.

  “You’re not going to take it home?” said Angus.

  “I am.”

  “Where you going to put it, then?”

  “In a bucket of water. Just in case it’s alive. It might hatch—you never know.”

  “Mother won’t like it.”

  “Mother won’t know.”

  “She’ll ask what’s in your sack.”

  Kirstie thought quickly. “Seaweed,” she said. “Grumble puts it on the garden for manure.” And on top of the thing she placed some bunches of kelp.

  When they had all climbed the cliff path again—Grumble complaining loudly of the weight of the driftwood bundle he carried—the children went off together to the garden, a small plot on the sheltered side of the white cliff-top house. Here their grandfather grew vegetables, grumbling endlessly about the poorness of the soil, the unkindness of the weather, and the damage done to his plants by birds and slugs and caterpillars.

  Kirstie put the seaweed on his compost heap, filled a large bucket with water, and tipped the giant mermaid’s purse into it. It was too big to submerge, and two of its four tendrils stuck out forlornly above the surface.

  “It’s too big,” Angus said.

  “I can see that, silly,” said Kirstie. “But at least it will keep it from drying out.”

  “What’s it matter if it’s dead anyway?”

  “We don’t know it’s dead.”

  “Well, it soon will be.”

  “Why?”

  Angus sighed. “It came out of the sea, didn’t it? That’s tap water. It needs salt water.”

  “Angus!” cried Kirstie. She gave him a hug. “You’re brilliant!” she said.

  “I know.”

  Making sure that Mother was elsewhere, Kirstie got the container of salt from the pantry and poured a generous measure into the bucket. She looked carefully at the sticking-out tendrils, but they didn’t move. “It needs a bigger place,” she said. “I know! The bathtub!”

  —

  How the rest of that day dragged, but at the end of it luck was on their side. Mother had had a bath after her morning’s work. Grumble, on being asked, said no, he didn’t want a bath, too much washing was bad for your skin, and anyway the water was always either too hot or too cold. So that only left the children. Mother gave Angus his bath at bedtime and left the water in it for Kirstie.

  “He wasn’t all that dirty,” she said, and she took Angus downstairs to dry him by the fire, where Grumble sat listening to the radio (turned up very loud, for he was rather deaf) and moaning that the program was rubbish.

  Kirstie moved fast.

  First she let out Angus’s bathwater. Then she put the plug back in, turned on the cold tap, and tiptoed down the stairs and out into the garden. In a couple of minutes she was back in the bathroom, the giant mermaid’s purse in both hands, the container of salt tucked under one arm. She lowered her burden gently into the water, added a little hot for luck, poured the whole contents of the salt container in, turned off the taps, and went out of the bathroom, closing the door.

  Kirstie awoke once in the middle of the night and could not resist opening the bathroom door and peeping in, but the thing was just floating, motionless. “You’re stupid,” she said to herself as she was drifting back to sleep again. “It’s probably just a piece of seaweed, that’s all. First thing in the morning, before anyone’s up, I’ll take it out and chuck it on Grumble’s compost heap.”

  First thing in the morning, Kirstie went quietly along to the bathroom. She had just grasped the handle of the door when she thought she heard something. She bent down, her ear to the keyhole. Through it she could hear a small splashing, such as a little fish might make breaking the surface of a stream, and then a small squeaking noise, a kind of chirrup, such as a little bird might make breaking from the shell of its egg.

  Kirstie opened the bathroom door.

  2

  It’s a Monster

  ONE LOOK INTO the bathtub was enough to send her hurrying to get Angus. As usual, he awoke from the deepest of sleeps with his mind instantly tuned to his chief pleasure in life.

  “I’m hungry,” said Angus. “Is breakfast ready?”

  “Ssssshh!” said Kirstie. “Don’t talk so loud. We mustn’t wake Mother or Grumble.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s hatched. The thing. In the bathtub.”

  “Blow me down!” said Angus.

  Angus enjoyed using what he thought to be terrible swear words, and his father, on his last shore leave, had taught him a careful selection of sailors’ oaths.

  They crept into the bathroom and stood side by side, gazing into the water.

  “Look!” said Kirstie.

  “Shiver my timbers!” said Angus.

  The giant mermaid’s purse lay on the bottom at the plug hole end like a sunken wreck. Wrecked it was, too, with a gaping hole in one side where something had emerged. At the other end of the bathtub swam that something.

  When Kirstie was a grown woman with a family of her own, her children would ask her time and again to describe what it was that she saw in the bathtub that early March morning when she was eight years of age.

  “It was a little animal,” she told them, “such as neither I nor your Uncle Angus had ever seen before. Such as no one in the world had ever seen before, in fact. In size, it was about as big as a newborn kitten but quite a different shape. The first thing you no ticed about it was its head, which was sticking out of the water on the end of quite a long neck. More than anything, it looked like a horse’s head, with wide nostrils like a horse and even a suggestion of pricked ears. But its body was more like a turtle’s. I don’t mean it had a shell—it had a kind of warty skin like a toad’s, greeny grayish in color—but it had four flippers like a turtle has. And then it had a tail like a crocodile’s. But just like you usually look at people’s faces before you notice anything else about them, the thing that struck us was the look of its head. We didn’t think about a crocodile or a toad or a turtle. We thought about a little horse.”

  Now, as Kirstie and Angus watched, the creature, which had been eyeing them in silence, dived with a plop, swam underwater with strong strokes of its little flippers, and surfaced again right in front of them. It looked up at them and chirruped.

  “What does it want?” Kirstie said. The answer to this question was obvious to someone like Angus.

  “Food, of course,” he said. “It’s hungry, like me.”

  “What shall we give it? What do you suppose it will eat? What do you suppose it is anyway? We don’t even know what sort of animal it is.”

  “It’s a monster,” said Angus confidently. He had a number of picture books about monsters, and obviously this was one of them.

  “But monsters are big,” Kirstie said.

  Angus sighed. “This isn’t a monster monster,” he said. “This is a baby one.”

  “A baby sea monster!” said Kirstie. “Well, then, it would eat fish, wouldn’t it? We’ll have to catch some fish for it.”

  A happy smile lit up Angus’s round face. “We don’t need to,” he said. “There’s some sardines in the pantry. I like sardines.”

  Opening the sardine can was difficult, but Kirstie managed to turn the key far enough to winkle one out, and they tiptoed upstairs again, carrying it on a saucer.

  “Don’t give it everything. It might not like it,” said Angus hopefully, but when Kirstie pulled off a bit of sardine with her fingers and dropped it into the bathtub, the little animal snapped it up and gulped it down and chirruped loudly for more.