Water Horse

One look into the bathtub was enough to send her hurrying to get Angus. As usual, he awoke from the deepest of sleeps with his mind instantly tuned to his chief pleasure in life. "I'm hungry," said Angus. "Is breakfast ready?" "Ssssshh!" said Kirstie. "Don't talk so loud. We mustn't wake Mother or Grumble." "Why not?" "Because it's hatched. The thing. In the bathtub." "Blow me down!" said Angus. Angus enjoyed using what he thought to be terrible swear words, and his father, on his last shore leave, had taught him a careful selection of sailors' oaths. They crept into the bathroom and stood side by side, gazing into the water. "Look!" said Kirstie. "Shiver my timbers!" said Angus. The giant mermaid's purse lay on the bottom at the plug hole end like a sunken wreck. Wrecked it was, too, with a gaping hole in one side where something had emerged. At the other end of the bathtub swam that something. When Kirstie was a grown woman with a family of her own, her children would ask her time and again to describe what it was she saw in the bathtub that early March morning when she was eight years of age. "It was a little animal," she told them, ""such as neither I nor your Uncle Angus had ever seen before. Such as no one in the world had ever seen before, in fact. In size, it was about as big as a newborn kitten but quite a different shape. The first thing you noticed about it was its head, which was sticking out of the water on the end of quite a long neck. More than anything, it looked like a horse's head, with wide nostrils like a horse and even a suggestion of pricked ears. But its body was more like a turtle's. I don't mean it had a shell--it had kind of warty skin like a toad's, greeny grayish in color--but it had four flippers like a turtle has. And then it had a tail like a crocodile's. But just like you usually look at people's faces before you notice anything else about them, the thing that struck us was the look of its head. We didn't think about a crocodile or a toad or a turtle. We thought about a little horse." Now, as Kirstie and Angus watched, the creature, which had been eyeing them in silence, dived with a plop, swam underwater with strong strokes of its little flippers, and surfaced again right in front of them. It looked up at them and chirruped. "What does it want?" Kirstie said. The answer to this question was obvious to someone like Angus. "Food, of course," he said. "It's hungry, like me." "What shall we give it? What do you suppose it will eat? What do you suppose it is anyway? We don't even know what sort of animal it is." "It's a monster," said Angus confidently. He had a number of picture books about monsters, and obviously this was one of them. "But monsters are big," Kirstie said. Angus sighed. "This isn't a monster monster," he said. "This is a baby one." "A baby sea monster!" said Kirstie. "Well, then, it would eat fish, wouldn't it? We'll have to catch some fish for it." A happy smile lit up Angus's round face. "We don't need to," he said. "There's some sardines in the pantry. I like sardines." Opening the sardine can was difficult, but Kirstie managed to turn the key far enough to winkle one out, and they tiptoed upstairs again, carrying it on a saucer. "Don't give it everything. It might not like it," said Angus hopefully, but when Kirstie pulled off a bit of sardine with her fingers and dropped it into the bathtub, the little animal snapped it up and gulped it down and chirruped loudly for more. "It likes it," said Angus dolefully. He broke off another piece of fish, his hand movingKing-Smith, Dick is the author of 'Water Horse', published 2000 under ISBN 9780375803529 and ISBN 0375803521.