“Who’s egg-bound?” asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta ignored him.
“I’ve tried massage; I’ve tried Vaseline; I’ve tried a steam kettle,” she said to her sisters.
“What about castor oil?” suggested Coral.
“It’s worth a try, I suppose.”
“Can we help?” asked Minette.
“No.” Etta looked up briefly. “Well, perhaps you can carry the buckets. We’re going up the hill. And kindly fold your napkins properly when you leave the table. You left them in a disgusting heap yesterday.”
It was quite a procession which wound its way up the hill. Etta carried an enormous bottle of castor oil, Fabio lugged a footstool and a primus stove, Minette had two buckets and a bundle of rags.
The path was steep and the morning was warm but Aunt Etta kept up a fierce pace. She also chose to give them a lecture as she went.
“Now I want to make it absolutely clear to you that I will not have favourites on this island. The unusual creatures you will be working with are no more important than the ordinary ones. A sick water flea needs help just as much as a mermaid. A flounder is exactly as important as a selkie. I hope you understand this because if you don’t, you’re not going to be any use doing your job.”
The children said, yes, they had understood it, but when they reached the top of the hill they were pleased they had been warned.
There were two hills, actually, with a dip in between which held a loch of dark, peaty water. On the far side of the loch was a great pile of brushwood and boulders and bracken. It looked like one of the stockades that the settlers in America used to build to protect themselves from the Indians.
But what stuck out over the top of the stockade was not an American settler. It was the head of an absolutely enormous bird.
The head was black but its beak was a bright yellow and made the children think of those great machines — crunchers or diggers or shovellers — that one sees looming over building sites. Its eyes were yellow too, huge and round and mad-looking, and as they stared they were blasted backwards by the deep honking noise they had heard on the first day.
“What is it?” stammered Fabio.
“It’s a boobrie,” said Aunt Etta, striding round the edge of the loch. “And I can tell you there aren’t many of those left in the world. They’re a sort of cousin of the dodo — people thought they were extinct but they weren’t. They developed on a different island and the sailors didn’t find them so they just grew and grew and grew. But then people started doing atomic tests and that kind of nonsense and the ones that were left managed to fly away.”
She led them round the other side of the stockade and they saw a short ladder propped against the side of the nest. Aunt Etta climbed up it and beckoned to the children to follow but they hung back, thinking of the huge yellow eyes, the dreadful beak.
“Hurry up!” said Etta and, as they still hesitated, she turned round, took a deep breath, and let them have it. “I have to tell you that kidnapping you was quite the most unpleasant experience any of us have had: that boarding house full of yacking women, and the London Underground with all those fumes. If you think we’d have gone to all that trouble just to let you get eaten by some bird, you need to have your heads examined. Anyway boobries are vegetarians, at least this kind are — more’s the pity.”
So the children followed her up the ladder and jumped down into the nest which was trampled flat and lined with moss and feathers.
The boobrie was not really so enormous. She was smaller than an African elephant — more the size of an Indian one. It took a lot of courage to look up at her but when they did the children stopped being afraid. She could hurt you, of course, by stepping on your feet for example, but they could see that she was a bird with serious troubles of her own.
The nest was ready for eggs but there were no eggs to be seen. The boobrie’s chest looked sadly naked so that they knew it was her own feathers she had plucked out to make a warm lining, but a lining for what? Where were the eggs and where the chicks that would follow?
“I have to tell you that I am very worried about her,” said Aunt Etta. “Being egg-bound is a most serious business.”
“You mean her eggs are stuck inside her? She can’t get them out?” asked Minette.
“That’s right. And she’s too uncomfortable to go and look for something to eat.”
“Doesn’t she have a mate to bring her food?” asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta snorted. “She had but she’s lost him.”
“You mean he’s dead?”
“He may be, for all I know. Or he may have lost the way or forgotten all about her. You know what men are.”
This annoyed Fabio. “I’m a man, or I will be, and I’ll never leave my wife to starve in a nest. Never.”
“Why did you say it’s a pity she’s a vegetarian?” Minette wanted to know.
“Because it makes it hard for us to feed her. We could have thrown her a frozen side of beef, but to dredge up all those sludgy sea lettuces and sea noodles and gutweeds takes hours,” said Etta. She was stamping round the boobrie, batting her with a stick, thumping her. “Get up, you stupid bird. I’m trying to help you.”
At first the boobrie wouldn’t move; she sat hunched and shivering and from her throat came a single squawk which seemed to be her way of saying “Ow!” But Etta was merciless. She thumped and scolded and prodded the bird till she struggled to her feet and stood there swaying and honking.
Then she climbed on to the footstool and peered into the boobrie’s back end and there, sure enough, was a glimmer of white speckled with blue.
“You can make seventy-two omelettes from one boobrie’s egg,” said Etta when the children had had a look.
But of course she didn’t want seventy-two omelettes — she didn’t care for omelettes anyway — she wanted living chicks. “The next part is going to be messy,” she warned.
But the children stayed to help, dipping rags into the hot castor oil and handing them to her as she dabbed and swabbed at the opening.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” she said when she’d finished. “But if this doesn’t work…”
“Could she…die…?” asked Minette in a quavery voice.
“Anyone can die,” said Etta snubbingly. “Including you and me.”
But before she marched the children down again she took them up the further hill, which was the highest point of the Island.
The view was incredible. To the west, miles and miles of unbroken water with the sun making a golden path between the clouds, and to the east, a long way off but with their outlines sharp and clear, two islands; one hilly, one low and long.
And on a grassy ledge overhanging the wild northern shore was an ancient burial ground, with leaning and broken gravestones covered in lichen and battered by the rain.
“There’s supposed to be a ghost here,” said Etta. “But she only turns up every hundred years or so.”
“What sort of a ghost?”
“A good ghost. A kind of hermit. She was called Ethelgonda and she lived on the Island and looked after the creatures.”
“Like you,” said Minette.
“Not in the least like me,” said Aunt Etta crushingly.
“I didn’t think good people became ghosts,” said Fabio.
“Well, a spirit then.”
The children spent the rest of the day collecting the special seaweeds that the boobrie ate and harrowing them up to her nest. Each time they watched anxiously for a sign of an egg but nothing seemed to be happening at all.
They were getting ready for bed that night when Myrtle came upstairs excitedly, her long hair flying.