Page 4 - My FlipBook

4

Of course Bazi, being a hyena, liked really smelly things best. The stinky
old bones that lay around, the doggy stench inside the den, other hyenas’
bottoms, even auntie Moonhag’s foul breath—which to tell the truth, had the
strongest pong of all—these things were like delicious perfume to Bazi.
So you can imagine his interest when one day, nose to the ground, he
came upon a stink he had never smelt before. What could it be? He looked
around but he couldn’t see anything unusual. He noticed that auntie
Moonhag was dozing with her head on her paws in the shade of a bush
nearby. She was practically asleep.
Bazi knew he wasn’t supposed to go out of her sight—but Moonhag
wasn’t watching, and the new smell was so inviting! His sisters had their
backs to him. They lay side by side, strengthening their baby teeth on an old,
dry piece of horn.
“I think I‘ll practise my tracking,” thought Bazi. “Why not? Lady Crocuta
says it’s a very important part of hunting.” So he put his little black nose
down to the ground and tiptoed off, carefully following the faint trail of
scent. To Bazi it was like an invisible, smelly ribbon lying along the ground.
“I can always follow the trail back again,” he thought.
Along he went, under some trees, around a little rock, over a fallen log,
and right through a big patch of thorn scrub. The exciting smell was getting
stronger, which made the trail easier to follow, and Bazi found he could go
faster. On and on he went, until suddenly, he found the end of the trail.
His nose touched a large, bright green bug. The bug immediately lifted its
back end, and “Pfft!” before he could blink, Bazi felt the most awful,
stinging feeling inside his nose. Bazi had found a stinkbug, and it had
sprayed something very nasty, right up his nostrils!
“EEEEEeeeeuw!” he wailed, pawing his nose frantically, “Oooo-eeee-oy-
oy-oooo!” (which in hyena, means, “Ouch”).
The bug, which had thought Bazi was going to eat it, scuttled off and hid
under a log. The bug wasn’t wrong either, because if it hadn’t used its very

own self-defence spray, Bazi would most probably have gobbled it up.
But now, poor little Bazi sneezed and sneezed, and every sneeze hurt
more than the one before. He tried running backwards away from the pain,
but that didn’t work. He tried rolling on the ground, but the stinging didn’t
stop. He rubbed his nose in the dirt, but that just made him sneeze even
more. So he turned and ran, back to the den, as fast as he could. He wanted
auntie Moonhag to lick it better for him.
Bazi soon found that he didn’t know which way was home. He would
have to find that stinky trail again. He ran around in a big circle, sniffing and
sneezing but it was no good—his poor nose wasn’t working properly. He sat