Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea Read Online Free Page B

ants were quick and it was hard to catch hold of them, they were so tiny.
    He barely managed to stop enough to give him and George a snack. George, who was obviously feeling better, complained bitterly that a centipede would need a whole nest of these ants to fill him up.
    Josie sat there primly and wouldn’t touch a thing.
    Harry felt really uncomfortable, snapping up ants while Josie just sat there with her head turned away.
    “Do you eat ants’ eggs? They’re not exactly meat,” said Harry.
    “Oh, yes, of course, I eat all kinds of eggs,” she said.
    So they dug some more and found part of the ants’ nest. It had been disturbed and most of the eggs had been carried away, but there were enough to take at least the edge off Josie’s appetite.Actually, she did better than the others, because the eggs were bigger than the ants and you didn’t have to chase them.
    “Any eggs left?” George asked.
    Josie took him the last one.
    “Now what do we do?” he asked when he’d finished it.
    “I’m going exploring,” said Harry. “You and Jgn stay here.”
    “I’m coming with you!” said Josie.
    So they started exploring together, leaving George to rest.
    It soon turned out that the pile they were on was fresh-dug earth, and that it was enclosed by some kind of holder, sort of like the thing they’d travelled in, only not really.
    “This isn’t part of a tree,” said Josie knowledgably. “It’s what I call cold-hard. The Hoo-Mins do-diddle a lot with this stuff. I tried biting it once. Nearly brokemy poison-claw. You can’t burrow through it either. And sometimes,” she went on, “it do-diddles all by itself.”
    “You mean, it’s alive?”
    “Oh, no,” said Josie. “It’s not alive.”
    “So how can it move and – do-diddle?” He really liked this word (and so do I.)
    “Don’t ask me,” she said. “I only know it sometimes can. When Hoo-Mins are near it. It makes big vibrations and then some brown-choke comes out of it. It smells horrible. If it comes towards you, you have to run away like mad.”
    “This one’s completely stopped. Something very big must have bitten it.”
    Josie laughed her centipedish laugh, shaking up and down. “You are funny,” she said. “I told you, it’s not alive and it never was.”
    They ran and explored all over the cold-hard thing, which certainly was very bigindeed. In fact it was a mechanical digger with a big heap of fresh earth in its shovel, but they didn’t know that.
    “Will it start to do-diddle in the bright-time?” Harry asked intelligently when they’d explored all over it.
    “Yes, I expect so,” she said.
    “Will it move along?”
    “That’s what they do.”
    “Might it take us home?”
    Josie ran round to face him. She rubbed her head against his.
    “Hx,” she said kindly. “It can’t take us home. We’re too far away, and there was all that no-end puddle in between. I don’t think we’ll ever get home,” she finished quite cheerfully.
    These were terrible, terrible words for Harry. He drooped and trailed his feelers in sadness.
    “Do you mind all that much?” Josie asked.
    “Yes. Because my mother’s there. She’s old and she needs me to look after her.”
    “I don’t know about that. I don’t think I ever had a mother that I can remember,” said Josie.
    “I know it’s not very centipede to stay at home with your mother,” admitted Harry. “I warm-heart mine, that’s why I stay.”
    “Warm-heart? Whatever’s that?”
    “You don’t know about warm-heart?” asked Harry in great surprise.
    “Never heard of it,” Josie said happily.
    Harry was completely flummoxed. He had no idea how to explain love to someone who hadn’t ever felt it. But he tried.
    “It’s a – a feeling. It makes you want to be with another, and, and – look after them.”
    “Doesn’t sound very centipede to me,” she said.
    “Well I’m as centipede as the next centipede and I warm-heart my mother, and I warm-heart Grndd too in a