Hammy the Wonder Hamster Read online

  ‘Mary!’ he cried. ‘You are wonderful! Which pet shop is it?’

  Dolittle’s Pet Shop had shut long before Tim got there, so he had to wait until the next day to talk to them. By then it was four days since a certain young hamster had found some shredded paper and the remains of a paper aeroplane that tasted deliciously of apple. He had a feeling that something got stuck in his pouch when he was eating, but by then he was already thinking of apples and aeroplanes.

  chapter 3

  While Bethany finished her tea, the hamster was still thinking about his name. A hamster, he thought, should be allowed to choose a name for himself. Then he’d have to let Bethany know what it was. What could ‘Hammy’ be short for?

  Tim Taverner had programmed the microchip with an encyclopaedia or two and a few dictionaries. It was easy for Hammy to run through a list of things beginning with ‘Ham’.

  Hamilton – that was nice. There was a play about a prince called Hamlet, but he was rather a sad prince and died at the end. No, he wouldn’t be Hamlet. Hammerhead shark? Definitely not. Then there was Hammurabi. He was a king, but not a very nice one. Now he came to think of it, ‘Hamilton’ had a very pleasant sound to it. It was the name of a place in Scotland, a football team, and some Very Important People. He could be Hamilton the Handsome, or Hamilton the Hero. Yes. Hammy was short for ‘Hamilton’.

  ‘May I leave the table?’ asked Bethany when she’d hardly swallowed her last mouthful.

  ‘If you’re quite sure you’ve had enough to eat,’ said Mum.

  Bethany didn’t care whether she’d had enough or not. She only wanted to get back to her hamster. As she ran into her bedroom, the door banged behind her and he bolted for the safety of his nest box. Presently, he popped his head over the edge.

  ‘Sorry, Hammy,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  He looked at her, gave a little shrug as if to say that it didn’t matter, and scampered to the middle of the cage. The newspaper he had been playing with had been roughly patched together like a jigsaw. At that moment, Bethany remembered something her friend Chloe had told her – newspaper shouldn’t be given to hamsters. It was something to do with the print not being good for them if they tried to eat it. She reached into the cage to take it out, and suddenly was very puzzled, twice.

  The first puzzling thing was this – maybe any hamster might leave the scraps of paper lined up like that, but surely no other hamster would get all the pieces in the right order? The second was that, when she reached into the cage to take the newspaper out, the hamster firmly sat down on it and refused to move. His eyes looked fierce with indignation.

  Perhaps she’d better leave him alone. She shut the door. ‘Just don’t eat the crossword,’ she said. ‘It might upset your tummy.’

  She could have called her parents, or Sam, to come and see what he’d done – but when you don’t believe your own eyes, how can you expect anyone else to believe them? What she really wanted to do was to get him out of the cage to play, but there was the awkward question of maths homework to do first. She’d have to do it now, as quickly as possible, to get it out of the way and have the rest of the evening to play with her hamster. Bethany sat down at her desk.

  She worked out the easy questions first, went back to the ones that were too difficult, and, finally, frowned and struggled over the one she couldn’t do at all. Bethany always found maths difficult and had just started doing percentages. She didn’t understand them, so the question about 11 per cent of £14.00 left her completely confused, and the more she tried to make sense of it, the more confusing it became. When she still couldn’t do it she decided that she’d understand it better after a little break, so she opened the cage door and lifted the hamster on to her hand.

  Hamilton was very glad about this. He’d been getting bored. Having put the Sudoku back together again, he’d completed it in his head and tried to scratch in the answers, but the paper kept crumpling up and tearing. Then he’d tried to say ‘Bethany’, but found his mouth couldn’t make the right sounds. He had a go at saying ‘Hamilton’, then ‘Hammy’, but that was a lot harder than working out Sudoku in his head. The microchip in his cheek meant that he understood any language, including animal languages, and could read as many alphabets as Tim had crammed into the memory, but a hamster mouth isn’t much good at speaking human languages, so Hamilton’s attempts to speak English left him cross and frustrated. Searching for something else to do, he had explored every corner of his cage and had already worked out how to open the catch and let himself out before Bethany opened the door.

  Bethany sat her new hamster in the palm of one hand and thought that he looked like a fluffy pom‐pom, but an intelligent fluffy pom‐pom. She stroked his head very gently with one finger. Not for the first time, she was telling herself that he was really, truly hers. She took in every detail of his soft fur, his pink ears, his delicate colour and the way his nose twitched. His dark eyes were bright, as if he were looking forward to something.

  ‘My hamster,’ she whispered. ‘Really mine. I can’t believe it. I’m glad I saved up and bought you myself because it makes you even more mine, doesn’t it, little Hammy? That name will do for now, until you have a proper one. You’re the best hamster in the world!’

  This puzzled Hamilton a bit. Was he really that special? But more than anything else, he felt warmly and wonderfully happy. Bethany had bought him and thought the world of him, and what could be better than that?

  ‘Do you like your cage?’ she asked softly. ‘This is your home.’

  He very much wanted to say, ‘It’s a very nice cage, thank you, and I like you too,’ but it was no good trying. Instead, he observed her face with great care. Hair – dark brown, a little past her shoulders. Something gold was growing on her head – oh, that was a hairband. Eyes – greeny‐brown. She was still wearing her school sweater, which looked worth exploring, so he ran up her sleeve, popped out at her collar and scrambled on to her shoulder. His whiskers tickled her neck.

  Bethany laughed, picked him up and was about to put him on the floor when she remembered that she was supposed to put something over the carpet first. She was pretty sure that her new Hammy was much too well‐behaved to poo and pee on carpets, but she’d better not risk it. It would have to be newspaper again. She put what was left of the paper on her desk, gently placed him on it, and told him not to eat it. Then she looked down at her homework.

  Hamilton loved newspapers! He wouldn’t dream of wasting one by eating it! While Bethany spread her books on the desk beside him he read all about the prime minister’s visit to Preston, the price of petrol in Poland and a woman who believed that carrots were intelligent. It was all very interesting but there weren’t any puzzles on that page, so he scrabbled the edge of the page to lift it up and burrowed underneath. He could see an article about helicopters, which was really exciting. From the corner of her eye, Bethany saw something move.

  ‘Hammy?’ she said. For one terrible moment, she didn’t know where he was – then she saw the bulge moving about in the newspaper.

  ‘Hammy!’ she cried, and lifted the page to pick him up, but Hamilton, who had just got to the best bit, jumped down again and ran straight back to his place. Bethany watched the way his head moved from left to right. He looked exactly as if he were reading.

  He was a fast reader, and had soon finished with the newspaper. Now, he was curious to know what Bethany was doing, so he scratched at her shoe till she looked down, laughed, and put him on her desk. She wanted to play with him, but instead she gave herself a little shake and looked down again at her homework. She wasn’t supposed to use her calculator to do this and she was supposed to show how she worked out the answer.

  ‘But that’s the trouble!’ she said aloud to Hammy. ‘If I knew how to work out the answer, I would have done it by now!’

  Hamilton ran over her hand and on to her book to see what she was doing. He made another great effort to speak because he wanted very much to tell
her that 11 per cent of £14.00 was £1.54, but the words were too difficult to pronounce. Perhaps he could scratch it on the page – he began to make claw marks. One, decimal point –

  ‘Hammy!’ cried Bethany, picking him up again. ‘Are you playing with the paper?’ She kissed him and put him back down. Hamilton sighed deeply. Humans were supposed to be the most intelligent species on earth, so why didn’t this one understand what he was trying to tell her?

  That was when he noticed the calculator. He had no idea how he knew what a calculator was, but of course he did know. He pressed all the right keys to show her the answer, but she was looking for an eraser and didn’t see him. Finally, she decided that the only thing to do was to ask Dad for help, and took her hamster downstairs with her.

  Dad was watching a quiz programme. He sat down at the table with Bethany and explained about percentages, while Hamilton took his place on the armchair, watched the quiz, and wondered why all the questions were too easy. With a bit of help and explanation, Bethany had soon worked out that the answer to the question was £1.54, then she asked:

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes, love?’ said Dad.

  ‘It’s about my Hammy,’ she said, and didn’t know how to go on. She wanted to tell Dad about the patched‐up puzzles and the way Hammy had seemed to be reading, but perhaps she should be careful. Dad might think she was just being silly. Worse, he might think there was something wrong with her beautiful new hamster and want to take him back to the shop.

  ‘What about him?’ asked Dad. He turned to stroke Hamilton’s golden head with a finger, and laughed. ‘Look at him! He looks as if he’s watching the telly.’

  ‘I mean…’ She began to wish she hadn’t started. It wouldn’t be easy to explain this. ‘He seems to be very intelligent – I mean, more than you would expect for a hamster.’

  ‘’Course he is, love,’ he said, and hugged her. ‘The cleverest hamster in the world.’

  Bethany sighed. She decided to leave it at that. Dad wouldn’t understand. Not even Chloe would understand, and if she did she might be jealous because Toffee wasn’t clever. She went back to her room, put her hamster in his cage and, tidying up her school books, picked up her calculator. Standing out on the screen, as clearly as could be, was ‘£1.54’.

  Bethany knew very well that she hadn’t worked it out. She hadn’t touched the calculator. The hamster was running happily in his wheel.

  ‘Hammy?’ she said. But he simply went on running, only stopping to drink from his bottle or eat a sunflower seed. He looked just like Toffee or any other hamster. Thinking of Toffee reminded her that she hadn’t told Chloe about her hamster yet. Bethany picked up her mobile phone and keyed a text – GT MY HMSTR! YAY! – then sent it to Chloe with a photograph.

  It would be nice to hold him once more before she got ready for bed. She took him out and let him run from one hand to the other, his little paws tickling her palms, then, while she packed her school bags, put him down for a moment beside her phone.

  ‘Goodnight now, Hammy,’ she said presently, putting him in the cage, then she went to switch off her phone. But when she picked it up, she saw a text message on the screen that made her hand shake and her mouth drop open.

  The text message would change her life. It read:

  MY NAME IS HAMILTON. APPLE, PLEASE? THANKS.

  At that moment, Tim Taverner was at home in the room he used as a bedroom, a study, a workshop and a laboratory. He’d have to make a tracking device. With a microchip detector powerful and accurate enough, he should be able to find the microspeck and get it back. He would be teaching all the next day, but at the very first chance he would go down to Dolittle’s Pet Shop.

  chapter 4

  Long after Bethany was supposed to be in bed, she sat up, hugging her dressing gown round her and feeding slices of apple to Hamilton. She had written down sums for him and he had tapped out the answers on the text keys. Then she had given him a few more which were so hard she couldn’t work them out herself, which meant she couldn’t be sure if his answers were right or not (but they looked more or less right to her). She had asked him if he knew any other languages and he had tapped out JE COMPRENDS FRANCAIS, ICH VERSTEHE DEUTSCH and i speak rabbit. Then he had listed as many of his other languages as he could, but the text keys only did the English alphabet so he couldn’t answer in Russian, Japanese or Arabic. Finally, she put the phone on her bed and Hamilton on her hand.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ she asked.

  Hamilton shrugged. DON’T KNOW, he tapped out.

  ‘Most hamsters aren’t as clever as you,’ she said, stroking him with a finger.

  Hamilton lowered his head shyly, a little to one side. He looked pleased, but a bit embarrassed.

  ‘But where do you get all this from?’ she asked. ‘I mean, being able to think and calculate, and learn things?’

  He spread his paws and shook his head. He had no idea where his intelligence came from.

  ‘But – but you are a real hamster, aren’t you?’ she said.

  He nodded earnestly and, just to prove that he was as hamster as a hamster could be, stretched out his paws to his cage. Bethany placed him in it, and he picked up a sunflower seed and ate it. He stored another one in his pouch for later, then jumped on to his wheel and ran until it whirred so fast that his paws looked like eight instead of four. Finally, he jumped off and rubbed his face against her hand.

  All this made two things very clear to Bethany. One was that Hamilton, though he was wonderfully, amazingly intelligent, was a normal hamster in every other way. He still needed to eat, sleep and run as all hamsters ate, slept and ran. He needed to be looked after, just like any other pet.

  The other thing she realized was that it would be best, for the moment, to keep his intelligence a secret. If other people knew how clever he was, he was sure to be taken away. He’d probably be kept in a lab somewhere, and he wouldn’t like that.

  ‘Hamilton,’ she said. He put his head on one side and looked at her, washing his paws. ‘Hamilton Hammy, you’re a very, very clever hamster. But if other people know how clever you are they might try to take you away from me. So, when other people are here, you must behave like any ordinary hamster, just like the ones in the pet shop. Do you understand that?’

  He thought, nodded, and jumped on to her phone. WHAT IF I FORGET HOW THEY BEHAVE? he tapped out.

  ‘I don’t think you will,’ said Bethany, and had an idea. lsquo;I’ll get Chloe to bring Toffee here. He’s an ordinary hamster. You can watch him.’

  Tim Taverner didn’t know much about hamsters, but it didn’t take him long to work out that even if the microspeck had been swallowed by a hamster, he’d still be able to get it back. Whatever went into a hamster’s mouth was sure to come out, sooner or later, at the other end. He felt a lot calmer when he’d worked this out. All he had to do now was to take his tracking device down to Dolittle’s Pet Shop.

  Oh, bother, he thought. It won’t be that easy. If he wandered about with a tracking device that bleeped when it came near the microspeck, everyone would notice. And if anybody asked him what he was doing, he couldn’t very well say he was looking for hamster poo – and not just any old hamster poo but a Very Important Poo.

  Perhaps he could say he was doing a very important project for the government about hamster poo. No, they wouldn’t believe it. And if they did, it might be worse. They might give him whole wheelbarrows full of it to take home.

  Think, Tim, he told himself. Think. He asked himself questions and gave himself the answers.

  1. Who could go into a pet shop and look around anywhere, absolutely anywhere, with nobody minding?

  – A pet shop inspector, he told himself.

  2. How can I persuade them that I’m a pet shop inspector?

  – Find out what one looks like.

  He turned to the computer and tapped into the search engine: pet shop inspectors. Up popped a lot of brightly coloured adverts telling him where he could buy pedi
gree gerbils, sparkly dog collars and budgie mirrors. Finally, after a lot of searching and clicking, he found that to be an inspector he would need a suit (not too smart), a white coat (he had lots of those), a clipboard and an identity badge (he could fake one of those).

  Nobody must know who he really was, so of course he wouldn’t use his own name. And, just in case he met anyone he knew, he’d better disguise himself.

  Bethany and Chloe had known each other as long as they could remember, and lived in the same street. They were so much the same size and height that people sometimes forgot who was who, and just called Bethany ‘the dark one’ and Chloe ‘the blonde one’. If they knew them a bit better, they said Bethany was the quiet one and Chloe was the chatterbox.

  Bethany and Chloe sat on Bethany’s bed, each holding a cage with a hamster inside. Toffee was a soft brown colour, and bigger than Hamilton. Of course, Chloe had said ‘He’s lovely!’ about Hamilton, and she really meant it, but secretly she thought that Toffee was much nicer. And, of course, Bethany thought Hamilton was much nicer than Toffee, and she knew he was much cleverer, but she was too polite to say so.

  Bethany and Chloe both knew that two male hamsters should not be put together, or they’d fight. That was why they had agreed that Toffee and Hamilton mustn’t get too close to each other.

  Toffee wasn’t much of a fighter. His favourite things were eating, sleeping and making nests so he could do some more sleeping. Even so, he glared at Hamilton.

  ‘Can I hold your Hammy?’ asked Chloe.

  ‘’Course you can,’ said Bethany.

  Chloe opened Hamilton’s cage and lifted him out. ‘Aah!’ she said as she held him in the palm of her hand and stroked his head. ‘Hello, little Hammy!’

  Toffee was not at all pleased about this. Chloe was his. No cheeky little newcomer had the right to sit on her hand, and he clutched the bars of his cage like a prisoner, baring his teeth at Hamilton. The girls couldn’t understand what they said to each other in Hamster, which was just as well.