Hairy Hezekiah Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Copyright Page

  For George and Siobhan

  —N.B.

  1

  In a zoo in an English city there lived a camel. Do not think that I am being a liar, when I say his name was Hezekiah. It really was, honestly. He was a Bactrian camel, very big and heavy and covered with a lot of dark brown hair. On his back he carried two large humps. He was well-fed and kindly treated, but in one way Hezekiah was different from all the other animals in the zoo.

  They had friends to talk to—the lions in the Lion House, the gorillas and chimpanzees in the Ape House, the birds in the Aviary, the monkeys in the Monkey Temple—they all had others of their own kind with them or close by. They could roar or scream or whistle or chatter at one another as much as they liked.

  But there were no other camels for Hezekiah to make friends with. He was the only one, and he lived in a wire-fenced grass paddock all by himself.

  Hezekiah, you will have guessed, was lonely. Visitors to the zoo came and stood by the fence and looked at Hezekiah. They could hear him making deep grumbly noises as he stared out at them through his heavily lashed eyes, but they could not know that he was in fact talking to himself out loud.

  He had fallen into this habit because he had no camel friends to speak to, no camel voices to listen to, and, though he didn’t suppose the humans could understand him, it comforted him to speak his thoughts to the watching people.

  “Wish I had a pal,” he often said. “Don’t suppose you care but I’m the only camel in the zoo, did you know that?”

  Often, in reply to Hezekiah’s growling and snorting and the bubbly sounds that he made through his thick rubbery lips, the visitors made noises too. But of course Hezekiah could not understand what they were saying to him, and anyway he couldn’t hear much of it because his ears were very hairy inside.

  One day Hezekiah was standing by the gate to his paddock, staring out through his heavy eyelashes. It was a bitterly cold winter’s day. There were hardly any visitors in the zoo and none at all near him.

  He didn’t mind the cold a bit as his coat was so thick, but he was more than usually grumpy because he hadn’t yet been fed.

  “Where’s my blasted breakfast?” he growled. “I’m starving. My humps feel all floppy.”

  Camels store fat in their humps, and if they are really, really short of food, the humps shrink in size. Hezekiah wasn’t actually starving, of course, just hungry.

  When at last he saw his keeper approaching, carrying a bale of hay, he shouted rudely at the man. “Get a move on, slowpoke!” he boomed. “You’re late and I’m famished!”

  The keeper was a fairly new one who hadn’t been at the zoo for long. The only thing he knew about the camel was that he seemed to be a bad-tempered old thing who was always moaning and groaning.

  “Keep your hair on, Hezekiah,” he said as he slid back the metal bar that kept the gate shut. Now he opened it, threw in the bale of hay and cut its strings. “There you are, you old grouch,” he called, and he went out again, closing the gate behind him.

  Hezekiah tucked into his hay greedily, swallowing it down in great lumps. Like a cow, he would later lie down and chew the cud. When night fell, he got to his feet and, on his huge splayed hooves, lumbered over to the gate of the paddock and stood, as he often did, staring out.

  There was no one for him to talk to, for all the visitors had left the zoo, so, as usual, he talked to himself.

  “I wish,” said Hezekiah, “that I could open this gate. I could have a walk around the place, meet some other animals, make a pal perhaps, even though I’m the only camel in the zoo. I wonder if I could somehow open the darn thing. Perhaps it’s something to do with that metal bar. Maybe I could shift it.”

  He lowered his long neck and with his thick blubbery lips he mouthed at the bar. It was stiff and for a while he could not move it. “Easy enough for keepers with fingers and thumbs,” he grumbled, “but not for Bactrian camels.”

  He was on the point of giving up, but then he said to himself, “Oh, come on, Hezekiah, one last try.” He gave it one last push and at last the bar slid across and the gate swung open. “Bless my humps!” he said, and walked out.

  2

  The whole of the zoo was dark now, except for lights in a few of the buildings. As Hezekiah made his way toward the nearest one, he heard from within it a deep rolling roar that ended in a couple of grunts. So he made his entrance through the half-open door into the Lion House.

  Now, people cannot understand camel talk and camels can’t understand human language. But in one way almost all animals are cleverer than humans, because they can understand one another! To Hezekiah the noise that the lion was making meant, “I am the lion, the King of Beasts, and I’m locked up in this horrible cage. Darn it!”

  The camel made his lumbering way into the dimly lit Lion House and walked along in front of the row of cages. At the sight of him, there was a burst of noise from within them.

  “Mom! Mom!” cried some cubs. “Whatever is that thing? Will it hurt us?” “Of course not,” replied a lioness. “First, it can’t get into our cage, and second, if it could, I’d kill it and we’d eat it.”

  “And so would we if only we could get out of our cages,” growled several lions.

  “But what is it, Mom?” said the cubs.

  “Ask it,” said their mother.

  So they did.

  Hezekiah stopped and stood, looking into that cage. He didn’t like the smell of the lions, so he closed his nostrils as all camels can. He didn’t like the sight of them either, with their gleaming teeth and sharp claws, and certainly he didn’t like what they had said they wanted to do to him.

  But the bars of the cages looked nice and strong, thank goodness, and, in reply to the cubs’ question, he said, “Good evening” (for politeness costs nothing). “I am a Bactrian camel.”

  “Bactrian camel?” said one of the cubs. “What have you got on your back?”

  “Two humps.”

  “What’s in them?”

  “Fat,” said Hezekiah, and all the lions licked their lips.

  The biggest of the lions came forward to the front of his cage.

  “What are you doing in here?” he asked. “Why aren’t you in the Camel House?”

  “There isn’t one,” said Hezekiah. “I live in a paddock.”

  “Well, why aren’t you there?”

  “I’ve escaped,” replied Hezekiah, and a huge sigh of envy rippled through the Lion House.

  “How did you manage that?” asked the lion, moving closer to the bars. “Oh, and come a little closer, will you? I’m a bit deaf.”

  I’m not that stupid, thought Hezekiah.

  “Tell you some other time,” he said, and he turned and hurried out of the Lion House.

  He walked along a path to the next building, which was the Ape House, and made his way inside. In the first cage was a big gorilla.

  “Good evening,” said Hezekiah.

  “Is it?” replied the gorilla. “Why?”

  “I’ve escaped.”

  “All right for some,” said the gorilla gloomily.

  “Forgive me for asking,” said Hezekiah, “but you don’t want to eat me, do you?”

  “Eat you? No, I’m a vegetarian.”

  “Oh, that’s a relief,” said Hezekiah, and he moved on to the next cage, in which were two chimpanzees.

  “We heard that,” said one.

  “And before you ask,” said the other, “we are also mostly vegetarians. But now
and again we do like a nice bit of monkey meat.”

  “But not camel meat?” wondered Hezekiah.

  “What’s a camel?” asked the first chimp.

  “I am.”

  “Oh,” said the second. “No, thanks.” He shouted down to the other chimpanzee cages. “Would any of you chaps like to eat this fellow?” and in reply there were loud screams of laughter.

  Hezekiah could still hear the chimpanzees laughing as he made his lumbering way along to the next building in the zoo, which was the Aviary. Inside, almost all the birds were silent, asleep on their perches, though there were some owls who hooted softly at the sight of an intruder.

  “Who? Who?” they said. “To wit, who?”

  “Evening,” said the camel. “My name’s Hezekiah. I’m a Bactrian camel.”

  “Tough luck!” said a voice.

  Hezekiah peered in and saw a gray parrot staring at him.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “Look in the mirror,” said the parrot.

  I’ve been threatened, thought Hezekiah, then laughed at, and now insulted. What next?

  He made his way out of the Aviary and walked toward the Monkey Temple. This was a big round pit, inside of which were flights of circular steps leading up to a stone building in the center. It had a domed top and looked something like an Eastern temple.

  Hezekiah peered over the edge of the wall that surrounded the pit. He could see no monkeys, either on the floor or on the steps.

  “Good!” he said loudly. “There’s no one about to be rude to me.”

  At the sound of his deep booming voice, a number of little heads popped out of the small windows in the Temple, and he heard a chorus of angry shouts.

  “Be quiet!”

  “Push off!”

  “Sling your hook!”

  “Hold your tongue!”

  “Shut your trap!”

  As he trudged away from the Monkey Temple, Hezekiah began to think that escaping wasn’t much fun. “I wanted to make some friends,” he said gloomily to the surrounding darkness. “At least nobody was being nasty to me in my own paddock. I wonder what’s the next place I shall come to?”

  Even as he said this, he saw a single-story building looming up ahead of him. It seemed to be divided into two halves, each half having a door.

  “I wonder who lives here?” he said.

  Hezekiah could not read, of course. Had he been able to, he would have seen a notice above each door.

  LADIES, one said, and the other GENTS.

  3

  Camels can go a long while without drinking. When they do drink, they can gulp an awful lot of water, as much as fifteen gallons at a time.

  As Hezekiah neared the public toilets, his nose told him that there were no animals inside this building, but he could smell water and he realized that he badly needed some.

  He’d been so busy earlier grumbling about his food being late that he hadn’t had a drink from the trough in his paddock. Now, after what he’d had to put up with in the Lion House and the Ape House and the Aviary and the Monkey Temple, he was very thirsty.

  By chance Hezekiah picked the door marked GENTS and somehow squeezed himself through it. To one side was a row of four cubicles, and inside each there stood on the floor a large white basin with a plastic seat on it and a kind of tank above it.

  Hezekiah stretched out his long neck to reach one of the basins. It had water in it and he drank greedily till the basin was empty. He did this to each of the four basins in turn till all were empty, but he was still thirsty

  There was a lever sticking out of the tank above each basin, and Hezekiah, out of curiosity, gripped a handle in his mouth and turned it. Immediately there was a rush of water that filled the basin again.

  So Hezekiah drained it and turned the handle again and filled the basin and drained it again, on and on, till he was full of as much water as he could manage. Then he squeezed himself out of the GENTS backwards. The wind was cold on that side of the toilet block, so Hezekiah moved around and squeezed himself into the LADIES. He lay down on the floor and went to sleep.

  He woke up to a loud scream as an early morning cleaner came in and got the shock of her life when she bumped into something large and hairy.

  As the cleaner dropped her mop and ran away, Hezekiah got to his feet, gave himself a good shake, and looked about him in the growing light. Birds were beginning to sing and monkeys to chatter, and just beyond the public toilets, he could see the main gates of the zoo, still closed.

  “I’ve escaped from my poky little paddock,” said Hezekiah (not too loudly in case there was someone about), “but I am still a prisoner. If only someone would open those gates. Oh, how I wish they would!”

  Maybe there is a special deity that looks after camels, or maybe it was just sheer luck, but at that very moment one of the zookeepers came out of the lodge beside the gates, and opened them, to be ready in good time for the first of the day’s visitors. Even more fortunately, he then went back inside the lodge.

  Camels, even great big clumsy Bactrian camels, can move quite fast when they want to. Hezekiah left the shelter of the LADIES and GENTS and was out through those gates in a flash. His great padded hooves made no sound, and, in a final piece of luck, there was just at that moment no passing traffic on the road outside the zoo. Hezekiah hurried across it into the shelter of some trees.

  Looking ahead, he could see the green hillsides, empty of people at that early hour. Hezekiah shambled on up them, anxious to get as far as possible from the zoo!

  By now the world was waking up, and the noise of cars and trucks could be heard on the roads below, and then some humans appeared, jogging toward him. Luckily there was a large hollow in the grass nearby, and quickly Hezekiah lay down in it, his neck stretched out flat on the ground, long-lashed eyes and nostrils shut. If he’d had fingers, he would have crossed them. But his luck held and the joggers jogged past without noticing him.

  When they had gone, Hezekiah got to his feet and looked about him. Not far away he saw a thick clump of trees.

  “Better get in there,” he said. “Less chance of being seen and plenty of leaves to eat. I’ll stay there all day and move on when it’s dark again. I don’t want anyone to see me.”

  He chomped away at leaves throughout the day until eventually he came to the other side of the clump of trees and found himself on the edge of a garden. In the middle of the garden was a pond where a fountain spurted. Hezekiah wasn’t thirsty but he was curious. There didn’t seem to be anyone about, so he made his way to the pond.

  Inside were a lot of goldfish and they rose to the surface at the sight of the hairy face above them. They opened their mouths in big round “O” shapes and it seemed to the camel that they were all saying, “Who? Who?”

  “Actually, I’m a Bactrian camel,” said Hezekiah. “Don’t suppose you’ve ever seen anything like me before. Can’t stop, I’m afraid, in case someone else sees me.”

  But someone else did see him. It was getting dark by now and in the house at the end of the garden there were two small girls looking out of their bedroom window. They were twins called Josie and Milly, and they very often said the same things at the same time. Now they suddenly saw a large dark shape standing by the goldfish pond.

  “Whatever’s that?” they said.

  “Look at its humps; it’s a camel,” they said, as Hezekiah moved back toward the shelter of the trees.

  “Only one place it could have come from,” said Josie.

  “And that’s the zoo,” said Milly.

  “It’s escaped,” they said together.

  Then they heard their mother’s footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “Let’s not tell her,” said Josie.

  “She wouldn’t believe us anyway,” said Milly.

  Later Hezekiah continued his way across the countryside, avoiding roads and houses, and when dawn broke the following morning, he found himself in the middle of a large field. A number of strange s
hapes surrounded him.

  They were animals, he could now see, but animals such as he had never set eyes on before. They were quite large, though much smaller than he, and all were black and white in color. They looked curiously at the camel out of their mild eyes. Hezekiah did not feel threatened by these strange beasts.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “What are you?”

  The animals looked at one another, shaking their heads in bemusement.

  “Don’t you know?” asked one.

  “No.”

  “We’re Holsteins.”

  “What’s a Holstein?”

  “A cow.”

  “What’s a cow?” asked the camel. “I’ve never seen animals like you before.”

  “We ain’t never seen no animals like you before neither,” mooed all the cows. “What on earth are you?”

  “I’m a Bactrian camel,” said Hezekiah.

  “Come from Bactria, do ‘ee?”

  “I suppose so. Like you come from Holstein, I imagine.”

  Before they say something nasty about me, he thought, I’d better say something nice about them.

  “You’re very pretty,” he said. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go on then,” said one of the Holstein cows.

  “Well, what are those big things between your back legs? Big things with four other things sticking out?”

  “Udders,” they said. “What be them things on your back?”

  “Humps,” said the camel. “I store fat in them. What’s in your udders?”

  “Milk,” they said.

  “What for?”