Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes To Sea. Lynne Banks Reid

were everywhere! Running around on their two legs, making loud noises to each other, and moving lots of big things from place to place.

      “Hoo-Mins are so weird!” said George. “What are they all doing? They don’t seem to be hunting, or eating, or tunnelling – and what else is there? I can’t make it out at all.”

      “Oh, I know!” said Josie. “It’s do-diddle. They do-diddle all the time, I’ve watched them.”

      “What’s do-diddle?”

      “It means rushing about doing things that don’t make sense – that we’d never bother about. I don’t know if it’s to do with their food or their nests or what. It’s just – do-diddle.”

      They looked at her, puzzled and curious.

      “Do you watch Hoo-Mins a lot, then?”

      Josie looked rather uncomfortable. “Well, er – yes. I do watch them. From time to time. But I don’t understand any of it really.”

      “Tell us more,” said Harry.

      “Well,” Josie said. “This straight-up-hard-thing, for instance. I watched them do-diddle that. It wasn’t like this to begin with. It was just flat pieces of a tree. After they’d do-diddled it, it was like it is now, a different shape, big enough to hold all these yellow-curves and move them about.”

      George and Harry looked at each other. She wasn’t just a pretty poison-claw. She was clever.

      “So what are they do-diddling now?” asked George.

      They watched crackle-lessly for a while. Then Josie shrugged (a centipedish shrug of course, by hunching her front two segments).

      “They’re just moving things about,” she said. “They do that a lot. They’ve probably got some kind of plan, but I don’t know what.”

      None of them did, but you can, because I’ll tell you.

      Their crate had been brought to a big covered market. All the bustling and do-diddling was the Hoo-Mins preparing to sell the produce inside them.