THE WRONG POCKET

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 886, 1 February 1930, Page 35

THE WRONG POCKET

j Once in Australia there lived a baby kangaroo. liis name was Woppitt, I and he was an only child. His mother I was a middle-aged lady, stately, and ; inclined to stoutness, but she was clever, too. She always carried a pocket dictionary in her pouch so that when people argued with her she was never at a loss for a word. Sometimes Woppitt was very rude to her. He mocked her dignity and was impatient because she carried him so slowly. QLiite early in life he had discovered his mother’s dictionary in her pocket, and he would spend hours learning by heart all the longest and most difficult words lie could find. Whenever the herd moved about he travelled, of course, in his mother’s pocket, which, as you know, is every young kangaroo’s perambulator. Now, Woppitt’s mother was very slow, and Woppitt was always rudely urging her to go quicker. “Hurry up,” he would say, poking his head out. “Hurry up. We shall never get anywhere at this pace.” His mother, I am sorry to say, never reproved him; not even when he called her “a clumsy steam roller.” But she would make gallant efforts to lengthen her leap to please him, and would get all palpitty and out of breath, poor lady. There was another family who belonged to the same herd as Woppitt’s mother, and consisted of a young kangaroo and her daughter. The daughter’s name was Wanda, and Woppitt was furiously jealous because Wanda’s mother was slimmer, swifter and altogether more agile than his own. "Wanda’s mother could cover fifteen feet at a leap. Woppitt’s mother could do no more than seven, and that with great difficulty. Wanda, as you may guess, had the most exciting rides. And she never failed to pop out her head and jeer at Woppitt, as she and her mother bounded across the country, while the other pair would come struggling and panting along behind.

Wanda was never tired of teasing Woppitt about the difference between their respective mothers. I think that she was secretly rather envious of Woppitt’s long words, although of course she pretended not to be. “Long words,” she used to say. “Pooh! Anyone can use long words if they know where to find them. For myself, I don’t see the good of knowing lots of tongue-twisters if you can only travel a mile an hour. Do tell me; why does your mother keep stopping between the jumps? She looks just as if she’d forgotten her umbrella and couldn’t make up her mind whether to go back for it or to go on.” Woppitt put his nose into the air. “Corporal amplitude of my maternal parent does not permit of rapid acceleration,” he said. But secretly he was furious, and after that he was ruder to his mother than ever. One day the herd was browsing in its usual pasture when one of the older kangaroos suddenly pricked up his whiskers and began sniffing the air. The herd instantly stopped feeding, and began to sniff this way and that for scent of possible danger. “Dingbats,” shouted one of the herd, which is the kangaroo for “look out,” and everyone glanced round to where, not 100yds away, two men with rifles were crawling stealthily on hands and knees to\yard them. “Kwiketti,” shouted the mothers (that being kangaroo for “come here”), and instantly some 20 children, who had been frolicking about some distance from the rest of the herd, rushed pell-mell to their mothers, and hopped straight into their respective pockets. It was like the disappearing trick with top hat and rabbits. Before you could say “knife” the whole herd was i-aeing away before the sportsmen had time to even cock their rifles. Now it happened in the panic that Wanda and Woppitt jumped into the j wrong pockets; so that Wanda found j herself travelling with Woppitt’s j mother, and Woppitt with Wanda’s. At first Woppitt was puzzled by the sensation of travelling at great speed, j a thing he had never experienced j before. He knew that there was some- j thing wrong because he noticed that | the dictionary was missing from its ac- | customed corner and. indeed, the 1 whole of his surroundings was un- j familiar. So presently he put his nose j out and looked up, and you can imag- j ine what his feelings were when he j saw the mistake he had made. Just to j begin with, he found the feeling of I i speed was rather a pleasant one. Itj

A Kangaroo Story

was so different from anything he had known. But after a while he began to wish that Wanda’s mother wouldn’t go quite so fast. He calculated that she must be taking at least 14l't leaps; and every time she landed on the ground Woppitt felt like a ball feels when you bounce it hard on a wooden floor. She had a trick of swerving when she was in mid-air, which made Woppitt wish she wouldn’t. At the end of half an hour she looker’ round for the first time to see if th* rest of the herd was following. The were a long way behind and, bein; now- out of danger, they had slacker down, and some of the older ones wen sitting about on their haunches anc resting. Further back still was a speck or the horizon that was moving slowly nearer. It was Woppitt’s mother with Wanda comfortably seated in her pocket. Wanda’s mother swung round (the sudden swerve nearly finished off her now exhausted passenger), and began to race back to the herd. 'When she reached them she sat down and called to Woppitt to come oLit. What was left of him obeyed. As he sat there, bruised, bewildered, and breathing with great difficulty, his own mother cam© ambling up, and squatted down on the grass beside him. She. too, was a little out of breath. Wanda peeped inquiringly out of her pocket, and Woppitt noticed that she held an open book in her paw. Presently she saw him. “Had a good run?” she inquired. Then she said quietly: “Naturally, excessive rapidity is deleterious to infants who are accustomed to retarded perambulation.” You see she had been studying the dictionary.