Wrecker the Weasel and the Rare Egg Robbery

By Jason Cooke

Disaster looms in the countryside. A dismally wet spring threatens to wipe out the summer harvests, and ruin the eggs of nesting birds. Against this emerging backdrop is set an exciting, evocative and often very amusing story that takes the reader directly into the lives of the birds and animals for whom the weather can be both friend – and implacable foe.

The wise old toad, Tarquin, warns the animal community that without a successful harvest, starvation will follow in the winter. Meanwhile Wrecker the Weasel, leader of a group of professional egg thieves, is struggling to find – and steal – enough eggs to meet the demands of dangerous and powerful figures in the ferret underworld. Salvation for all could lie in the grain stores and hen house of nearby Half Mile Farm, but with the farm in the brutal grip of rodent gangster ‘Monsta’ the Rat, what steps can the beleaguered creatures take to secure their livelihoods – and their very survival?

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839784125

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Wrecker the Weasel and the Rare Egg Robbery

Jason Cooke

Wrecker the Weasel and the Rare Egg Robbery

Published by The Conrad Press in the United Kingdom 2021

Tel: [phone] www.theconradpress.com 
[e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-8397841-2-5

Copyright © Jason Cooke, 2021

The moral right of Jason Cooke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

Typesetting and Cover Design by: Charlotte Mouncey, www.bookstyle.co.uk

The Conrad Press logo was designed by Maria Priestley.

For those who I love… you know who you are!

Dramatis Personae

The Garden Animals

Brett: an inquisitive and resourceful young blackbird

Molly: Brett’s mother, an animal nurse and member of the Animal Council

Tarquin: a wise toad of many seasons, village elder and head of the Animal Council

Mixie: a young harvest mouse

Darius: a mole and member of the Animal Council

Harriett: a hoopoe, a rare visitor from abroad and an expectant mother

Benjamin: Harriett’s husband

Callum (collared dove), Natasha (nightingale), Simon (song thrush): garden residents

The Rotten Shed Gang

Wrecker: a tough weasel - rogue, adventurer, and experienced smuggler of birds’ eggs

Maguire: a piratical magpie - thief, smuggler and general villain

Jacqui: a preening and selfish jay - head of public relations for the Rotten Shed Gang

Thewk: elderly weasel, accountant for the Rotten Shed Gang

Jerrit, Rinspike, Lucca: weasel ‘runners’, smugglers in the Rotten Shed Gang

The Rats of Half Mile Farm

Monstavius the Fourth, or ‘Monsta’: crime lord and union boss

Skarskweek: Monsta’s second-in-command

Snook: a rodent wheat expert

And Finally…

Big Sam: a tough ferret, former professional pit fighter and now ‘fixer’ in the city underworld

Kai, Mila: two kestrels of importance in our story - residents of the hedgerows on the western side of Half Mile Farm

Baxx: a mysterious barn owl of indeterminate age and provenance

Pippa: a young border collie

For Reference:

1 Kilometre = 0.62 of a Mile

1 Metre = 3.28 Feet = 1.09 Yards

1

The garden

It was either the very end of spring or the very beginning of summer in a picturesque rural garden somewhere in the southeast of England. The garden belonged to a cottage in a pleasant village, which was only a mile or two from a pleasant town, which was in turn no more than thirty miles from the great city of London. For the birds and animals and insects that inhabited the garden their world was one of green and leaves and trees and water, unspoilt as nature should be, but that does not mean that it was without danger, as this story will show.

That particular spring had been unusually cold and damp, with a series of grey and drizzly days merging into each other, one after the other. The garden pond was full to overflowing, and a constant stream of water ran from an overflow pipe into the nearby flower beds. The garden lawn and bushes and shrubs were a vibrant, healthy colour, a rich tapestry of every shade of green and brown, interspersed with great flashes of red and mauve and white and pink where the rhododendron bushes were in full flower and the two large apple trees were coming into blossom. To the human owners of the cottage, their garden was a lovely sight and they did not mind the rain as it was good for their plants, but the garden animals were generally fed up with the wet weather and were longing for some sunshine to dry their damp fur and feathers.

The evening that our story begins was a typical wet evening during one of these typically wet and gloomy days. Three friends were sheltering under the cover of an old wheelbarrow which leaned against the cottage wall, rusty, cobwebby and almost forgotten, in a little visited part of the garden. They were a young blackbird, a harvest mouse, and a toad of advancing years.

Brett the blackbird was just over a year old and in his prime. His feathers were a rich shiny black and in perfect order, with none of them missing or torn or bedraggled, such as are sometimes seen on older birds or on ones that have been attacked by foxes or cats or hawks. His beak was a deep yellow verging on orange, and he cocked his head in a particular way when he was listening, which gave him the appearance of being very curious and very intelligent. In fact he was both of these things, and had earned himself a bit of a reputation among the garden animals as a bird who was willing to help solve problems. His bright eyes were active and alert and always on the lookout for sources of fun, amusement, interest… and danger. In short, he was everything that might be expected of a young male blackbird, and a particularly fine specimen at that.

Brett lived with his mother Molly in a nest of twigs in a dense thatch of twisted rose bushes, clematis and ivy. Molly was a sensible and resourceful bird who worked as a nurse at the Animal Hospital. Brett had inherited a lot of his common sense from her.

Mixie the harvest mouse was one of Brett’s closest friends. She was a little older than him but smaller, smaller also than the pet mice sometimes seen in houses, kept in cages with straw and water and a little wheel on which they amuse themselves by running on it and turning it. She had a pair of short furry ears and orange fur with a white tummy. She also had an incredible tail which allowed her to hold plant stems and ears of corn. She was generally very agile and athletic and in the past had taken part in sports competitions with the local squirrels, who prided themselves on their balance and athleticism.

Mixie was a decent creature with a kind heart. Normally she lived in the crop fields at nearby Half Mile Farm, but recently she had been spending more and more time in her second home in the garden. This was largely due to the increasing number of rats at Half Mile Farm, who were expanding relentlessly under the direction of their charismatic leader, Monstavius the Fourth – or ‘Monsta’ for short.

The third creature in company with Brett and Mixie that evening under the wheelbarrow was the old toad, Tarquin. Tarquin was a survivor. He had lived in the garden for ten years and seen many seasons and comings and goings. Unlike most of the other garden creatures, he loved the wet and often said that it could rain every day as far as he was concerned. He was portly on account of his years - no-one ever called Tarquin ‘fat’ - and had leathery mottled skin in various shades of brown, which helped to disguise him as fallen leaves.

Tarquin lived in a very damp and earthy den between a pile of mossy old bricks at the back of the garden. His den had a carpet of rotting leaves and a huge rhubarb plant grew right next to the bricks, providing a roof of wide green leaves. Rainwater often ran off the leaves right on top of his head – but he didn’t mind that.

On account of his age, Tarquin was very wise and known to all as an expert on garden affairs. His particular speciality was the weather. He knew just by reading leaves what the weather would be – rain, wind, snow, ice, fog, mist or sunshine. Tarquin could foresee them all. Occasionally he would forecast a rainbow and the garden creatures would look skyward in awe when he was proved right. Tarquin was the Oracle of the Weather. The other animals never argued with him over his forecasts and never questioned him on meteorological matters – they simply accepted that whatever he said was the truth and that was how it was going to be.

Sure enough, on the evening in question, the conversation between the three friends involved two subjects of great interest to all animals. The first subject was the weather. The second subject was food!

‘This rain has to stop soon,’ said Brett, peering out from under the metal rim of the wheelbarrow at the raindrops, which fell and danced and splashed on the flagstones and cobbles of the garden path. He shook his feathers irritably as a rivulet of water ran down his back and dripped into the small pool forming under his legs. ‘At least we have food now,’ he murmured, taking a beakful of unripe seeds and berries from a pouch made from sewn leaves that Mixie the harvest mouse held in her paws. Mixie would have agreed with Brett if her little mouth was not so full of berry and seed salad that she could not speak, her cheeks puffed out like she had a little round pea in each one. Instead she merely nodded vigorously in agreement.

‘Humph... ’ muttered Tarquin in his slow, croaky, gargling voice. ‘You may be having a feast now, with your berry and seed salad, but mark my words, there are dark days ahead. This rain is set to continue all summer long, and will ruin the harvest at Half Mile Farm. What will you eat in the winter, when there is no corn or grain or hay to live on?’

‘I’d hope we could trade with the rats at Half Mile Farm for some of their stored grain from last summer,’ said Brett, questioningly. ‘We have done this before in similar situations, I understand?’

‘Hummmph!’ snorted the toad. ‘I think you will find a lot has changed at Half Mile Farm in recent months, with Monsta in charge over there. By all accounts he is a very selfish character. I do not think he would be willing to share his precious grain reserves for the benefit of all animals. He would perhaps be prepared to share this year’s harvest with the animal community, as is customary, but as I say, this year’s harvest will be almost completely wiped out by bad weather. I believe he will hold on to all his grain reserves to see himself and his kind through the winter, and everybody else can go hang!’

‘I’ve never seen Monsta personally,’ put in Mixie, ‘but from overhearing some of the rats in the crop fields, he sounds like a most dangerous and unpleasant personage. Apparently he has huge stores of grain in several of the barns, but like a greedy king in a palace full of gold, doesn’t like to share any of it with others. I’ve heard rumours of certain animals, seed eaters, disappearing without trace after being caught by Monsta’s rats on farm lands, but I think they are just that – rumours. Nonetheless, it’s unhelpful having a rat like that in charge at the farm.’

‘How do you know it will rain all summer long?’ Brett asked Tarquin, although he really knew better than to ask.

‘I see it in the leaves and I smell it in the earth and I hear it in the calling and whispering of the wind,’ replied Tarquin, majestically. ‘Anyway, my advice to you is to plan for the winter now, and build stocks of nuts and berries and seeds from whatever you can find in the gardens and hedgerows and woods. If you rely on the harvest from Half Mile Farm, then come winter you are finished!’ He emphasised his final point in dramatic fashion by dragging his forelimb with its three warty fingers across his leathery throat.

Brett pondered on what Tarquin had said. He had heard from his mother about summer harvests destroyed by constant wet weather, but had never experienced one himself on account of his young age. But he could believe that the effects on the animal community could be catastrophic. His mother had told him of whole families of seed-eating birds and creatures dying of starvation, and certain species of the animal population taking years to recover. One such famine had been followed by a particularly harsh winter, when all the ponds and puddles froze solid, snow covered the ground and choked the iron-hard earth beneath, and Jack Frost hung icicles off all the trees in the area. The death-toll had apparently been terrible.

Brett tipped his head on one side and fixed his friends with his beady eye. He was not worried about Tarquin, who lived on worms and grubs and other nasties and had ample… reserves – he chose his phrase carefully – around his portly frame to sustain him through a harsh winter. The worst he would have to put up with would be a dinner consisting of drowned worms. This would be most unappetising, without question, but certainly still edible for a toad.

Mixie, however, was a different matter. She had to eat a lot of seeds and shoots and berries and ears of corn to produce the fuel necessary to keep that tiny frame alive. She should hibernate through the worst part of the winter, but even so, a bad harvest would be disastrous for her. She caught Brett’s eye and he looked at her and he knew she was thinking the same.

‘Shouldn’t we arrange a meeting of the Animal Council to discuss this news, Tarquin?’ warbled Brett. ‘This could affect many of us. Surely we will need to put some plans in place to prepare?’ He made a mental note to tell his mother Molly of Tarquin’s warnings. As an important garden bird, she had a place on the Animal Council, which met regularly and tried to act in the best interests of all the garden residents. With a wise and experienced head on his shoulders, Tarquin himself was normally the chairman.

‘I was going to ask you to begin arranging the next meeting, my boy,’ murmured Tarquin. ‘Thank you. Let your mother know that the council should meet in a few days’ time.’

Outside the shelter of the wheelbarrow the rain had let up a little,