A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The ground was alive.

Benji had been walking for ten minutes before he understood what he was looking at.

He had come across from the landing point on the path that wound through Skomer's interior — that particular Pembrokeshire island path, salt-edged and windswept, the kind of path that feels like the edge of the world because, from here, it very nearly is. The sea glittered on three sides. The sky was enormous. And the ground on either side of the path was carpeted, as far as he could see, in bluebells — that particular deep violet-blue that only exists on Skomer in May, dense and low and moving in the sea wind in long slow waves, the whole hillside breathing colour.

Benji's red collar was bright against it as he stopped and simply looked.

And then he noticed the burrows.

Not one or two. Dozens. Hundreds. The bluebell slope was riddled with dark round entrances, each one worn smooth at the lip, each one leading somewhere underground that smelled of warm feathers and old grass. The island's grassy surface was a city of tunnels, a hidden world just beneath his paws, and the bluebells were growing around and over and between the burrow entrances as if the flowers and the homes had been here together so long they'd stopped noticing each other.

He stood very still and listened.

From one of the burrows near his left paw: a sound. Not quite a growl. Not quite a purr. Something between the two — low and rhythmic and thoroughly domestic, the sound of a creature settled in its underground home on a morning when the wind was doing something inconvenient above.

Then the puffin appeared.

He came out of the burrow backwards, which seemed an odd choice until Benji remembered that the burrow was very small and the puffin's beak, in May, was not. The beak emerged last: spectacular, triangular, banded in orange and yellow and red — entirely too much beak for one small bird, the kind of beak that looked as if it had been designed for a creature three times this size and the puffin had simply decided to make it work.

He stood in the bluebells, orange feet planted on the violet carpet, and looked at Benji with one bright eye.

"You're on the path," the puffin said.

"I am," Benji agreed. "My name is Benji Booboos. I came over on the morning boat."

The puffin considered this. "First time?"

"Yes."

"You walked through the middle of the colony without standing on anything," the puffin said, with the tone of someone awarding points reluctantly. "Most visitors don't manage that." He tilted his head. "I'm Finn. My burrow is behind you. I've been trying to get to the clifftop to fish for an hour and I can't get my approach right."

"What's wrong with the approach?" Benji said.