– Peabody and Chipper
“Why are you asking me?” The koel asked. It’d taken all afternoon to identify Manfred’s mystery friend and now as dusk fell they found they’d ‘only just missed them’.
Peabody eyed the koel while Chipper asked again.
“Don’t come the raw prawn with me, Cherie,” she told the koel. “You’re a cuckoo. Seeing things is your livelihood. And anyway, you’ve been parked in this tree eyeing off every nest in the area for the last week. So tell us everything you know about this Felix bloke.”
“Koel,” Cherie corrected haughtily. “Cuckoos may be our cousins, but we are twice removed.”
“What,” Chipper’s upper beak curled as she spoke. “You mean you don’t kill babies, only eggs?”
“I’ll have you know there’s a huge difference.”
“And I’ll have you know there’s none at all. All life matters.”
Peabody watched with interest. Despite their words, Chipper and Cherie were both relaxed. But it was a show that had to be acted out—Chipper would ask a few questions, Cherie would pretend to be offended, Peabody would step in as peacemaker, they’d agree on a price, and then, well, just try stopping Cherie from blurting out everything she knew.
“What can I say?” Cherie continued the game. “It’s a simple matter of survival of the fittest.”
“Yeah,” Chipper said. “Your offspring’s survival is best if someone fittest at parenting can be persuaded to do it for you. And I’ll bet you’re very good at persuading.”
“I don’t see what any of this has to do with this mudlark.”
Peabody decided it was time. “What Chipper here is reluctant to tell you—” she hunched in close, cast a furtive glance over her shoulder, and whispered, “—is that we think the Magentas might be up to something.”
“Ooooh!” Cherie’s eyes sparkled as she leant in close too. “Like smuggling?”
“Yes.” Peabody masked her surprise. Could this really be about smuggling? That’d make sense with all those migrating types. “Exactly. And you might just be the one to help us find out for sure.”
“For a price.”
“How about your name in the story?” Chipper offered. It still surprised them both that anyone would want their name in a story casting a bad colour on the Magentas, but Cherie seemed to take a perverse delight in seeing her name in any news-leaf.
“And a signed copy of the leaf!” Cherie said excitedly. “ And a couple of free extra copies to give my friends!”
“I think we can arrange that.” Chipper hoped she sounded magnanimous. “But you have to tell us everything. When did Manfred get here, was Felix with him—everything.”
“Ok. Well, let’s see…Amy was here—she and I are going to do a deal but that’s none of anyone’s business. I was busy talking to her at the same time as updating my notes.”
This was the bit Chipper was best at but Peabody found tedious—the getting-to-know-you part of the story. It took too long, was convoluted, and was mostly just rubbish.
“…a conscientious pair of wattlebirds on my right, I wrote him down as ‘visits-nice-young-henling-next-tree-whenever-own-hen-not-looking’…”
Smuggling wasn’t something the Magentas were known for. And anyway, smuggling what? Fermented nectar? That would only upset the lorikeets. Not even the Magentas would dare do that.
“…and directly in front of me you can see a pair of native miners, Kelly and Mick, ‘new-to-neighbourhood-secrets-not-yet-revealed’…”
Surely not bird-smuggling?! Would Margaret sink that low?
“…‘Jim, henpecked, does anything for mother of his eggs’ and ‘Julie, free-spirited, pretends to search for food while actually seeing younger figbird across park’…
No, she probably wouldn’t. What was there left to smuggle that would be of any interest to anyone?
“…and well, I don’t want to sound too proud, but they raised one of my chicks last year…”
What if Cherie is just guessing? What if it’s not smuggling at all? Maybe Manfred was just trying to garner new workers for his mother’s worm farms.
“…Binti? You might have heard her? She’s a night-caller, like me; likes to keep the apes awake with her singing.”
But if so, why all the code and double-speak? Ahhh. The kind of worker no-one could keep tabs on. The kind of worker of no fixed abode.
“…Jim and Julie are great parents, rarely leaving their nest unattended. So there I am, I’m settling in for a long night…”
Hmmm. Smuggling. Migratory birds. Coming and going.
“So that’s it?” Chipper asked. “You didn’t see Manfred at all?”
“Of course I saw Manfred. But that was a completely different can of kookaburras.”
It was exactly the wrong time for Peabody to tune back in—she hated metaphors. “And let me guess,” she said. “You just happened to have a can-opener?”
Chipper saw Cherie’s body stiffen and her face take on a hurt look. “Forgive Peabody, you know she’s a bit too direct. What she means is, what was Manfred doing when you saw him?”
“Well,” Cherie brightened again. “He picked up Felix, didn’t he. Picked him up and took him away.”
“Picked him up?” Peabody said. “You mean like, birdnapped him?”
“No,” Cherie elaborated with an annoyingly patient talking-to-pigeons tone. “They went to the Tick and Cow.”
Peabody glanced up at the rising moon. “What—just now?”
“Yes just now. Just before you got here.”
“Why didn’t you just tell us that in the first place?”
“Well, you said you wanted everything!” Cherie looked offended again.
Evolution: it's for the birds 