Lynne Banks - Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea

Harry waited for George until he got fed up, and then he decided to start shifting their prey down the tunnels to where Belinda was waiting. George could bring more when he got back.

Harry was just trying to decide whether he could get the mouse down the hole whole, or if he should do it a leg at a time, when he sensed George’s signal.

“Hx! Come quick, I’ve found something!”

When Harry heard George’s signal he forgot all about being tired. He raced off, leaving the pile of prey unguarded. It probably wouldn’t have been there when they got back.

Only they didn’t get back.

He found George standing on his rear legs examining the sides of a straight-up-hard-thing. It was something Harry didn’t like the look of – some kind of trap.

“Grndd! Come away from that – it looks like a can’t-get-out!” crackled Harry, always the cautious one.

“No, it’s not! Look, there are long openings. You can easily get in and out of it. And look what’s inside!”

Harry stood tall beside George and stuck his head in through one of the long holes. The straight-up-hard-thing was full of tree-droppings.

Harry, like nearly all centipedes, was a meat-eater. He’d never eaten the stuff that fell down from trees. So all those yellow-curves didn’t interest him. But there was some kind of meat in there too. He could smell it. Spiders, he thought.

Harry dropped on to all-forty-twos again.

“We’ve got enough, Grndd,” he said reasonably. “I don’t feel like hunting any more.”

George gave him a look of scorn.

“Oh, come on, Hx! It’s those big furry juicy ones. Just one ! They’re my favourites!”

Harry was remembering that Belinda loved tarantula, especially the heads. She was really too old to catch them for herself any more.

“Oh – all right then,” said Harry. And he followed George through one of the long holes, which, in case you haven’t guessed, were actually gaps in a crate of bananas.

They followed the tarantula smell – unmistakable – into the bottom of the crate. The great spider was asleep, but it woke up with a jump as it felt them coming. It scurried on its hairy legs under a curved bunch of bananas, but George raced round to the other side of the banana-tunnel. They homed in on it from each side and stopped it before it was even properly awake. ‘Stopped’ means ‘killed’ in Centipedish – they don’t like saying ‘killed’ because it sounds too nasty.

“I must say, it smells wonderful,” said Harry. “What do you think, could we just have a nibble?” He was feeling suddenly starving after all their exertions.

“We’ll have to,” said practical George. “It’s too big to squeeze it out through those long holes unless we chew a bit off its big fat abdomen.”

“Don’t touch the head, though. We must save that for Mama.”

Well, before long the head was all that was left. And George was looking pretty hungrily at that, but Harry drew the line and said, with a centi-burp, “We’ve had enough, Grndd. Come on, we must go home now or big-yellow-ball will be coming back and then we might Dry Out.”

I ought to stress that, short of something getting them, Drying Out is the worst thing that can happen to centipedes. The rims of the breathing-holes along their backs have to stay damp or they can’t breathe, so they’re naturally very careful. In fact, if you’re a centipede, saying you’re ‘Dried-Out’ is like saying you’re done for.

They went up through the layers of bananas to the first long hole and tried to climb through it. But they were so full of tarantula that they found it was going to be a very tight squeeze indeed. Especially for Harry, who held the tarantula’s head in his poison-claw.

“We shouldn’t have eaten so much,” said Harry.

“I just couldn’t seem to stop,” said George. “H’m. Well. I suppose we’d better just curl up and have a nap till our meal has gone through and we’re thin again.”

So that’s what they did. They found a comfortable place among the bananas and fell asleep, curled up together with the head in between them, so no one could take it away.

If they’d only known it, that was the least of their worries.

They did a bit more than take a nap.

Many poisonous creatures can eat each other and not get poisoned themselves, but perhaps in this case some of the tarantula’s poison got into them, just enough to make them really sleepy. Because otherwise it’s hard to explain how they didn’t wake up when day came and the crate of bananas they were in was picked up by a forklift, loaded on to a big transporter and carried far from the banana plantation it had been in – far from their home-tunnel – far from Belinda. By the time they woke up, if they’d run their fastest for a week of nights, they couldn’t have found their way home.

Well. George had wanted an adventure. But this was going to be a lot more than even he had bargained for.

“Grndd!”

Harry woke up first. The straight-up-hard-thing was moving. It was jiggling. The curved ‘hands’ of bananas were jiggling too, and all the small creatures hiding among them, including Harry and George, were being shaken around. Some had been dislodged from their hiding or sleeping places amid the fruit, and had fallen to the bottom of the crate, where the centeens could hear them scuttling about anxiously. Harry, especially, was good at understanding other species’ signals. Now he thought, “There’s a lot of fear in here!”

“What’s happening?” asked George in alarm.

“I don’t know. We’re moving.”

With one accord, the two centeens scurried to the nearest long hole, the one they’d tried to squeeze out of before they fell asleep. They put their heads out. Their weak little eye-clusters could just make out bright light (which they hated) and lots of colours and patterns moving past them.

“Where are we? We’re not where we were last night!” crackled George.

“I told you! This is a can’t-get-out! I said we shouldn’t come in here!”

“It’s not a can’t-get-out, Hx. We can get out any time we like.”

“So what’s stopping us?”

They stood side by side on a banana, trying to get their bearings. They were far from the ground – that was obvious. They could see it racing past underneath them. “It’s a long way down,” said George.

“If we leave here we’ll Dry Out,” said Harry. Big-Yellow-Ball was shining hotly. They could feel the heat in the air and see the brightness outside the crate. The heat where they lived was a very damp kind of heat. They sensed they’d be all right as long as they stayed in the moist darkness inside the crate.

“We’d better wait till the moving stops,” said Harry. “And see what it’s like then.”

Meanwhile they tried to behave as if everything was all right, even though they both knew it wasn’t. They went back to their curved nest of bananas. Harry noticed something at once.

“Where’s Mama’s head?”

“Her what?” asked George blankly.

“The tarantula head we saved for her! It’s gone,” said Harry.

“Maybe it’s just rolled away somewhere.”

“No. I wedged it in tightly between these yellow-curves,” Harry said. “Someone must have stolen it!”

They began to quest around them. George suddenly froze.

“Hx, there’s one of us somewhere in here!”

Harry got it too, now. A decidedly pleasant aroma, amid all the whiffs of other, alien creatures like flies, beetles and spiders. Another centipede, certainly, but – different. Different from him, different from George.

“It’s my centeena!” crackled George softly.