>
HarperCollins Children’s Books a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Text copyright © Michael Morpurgo 2009. Illustrations copyright © Sarah Young 2009
Running Wild: Jacket photographs © PhotoAlto/Alamy (boy); Michael Llewellyn/Getty Images (Indian elephant); Gary Vestal/Getty Images (tiger); Michael Nichols/Getty Images (monkeys); JH Pete Carmichael/Getty Images (snake). All other images © Shutterstock.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Michael Morpurgo and Christian Birmingham reserve the right to be identified as the author and illustrator of the work.
Some images were unavailable for the electronic edition.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007267019
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780007380664 Version: 2018-11-09
For Ella, Lottie and Charlie, and in memory of their grandfather, Eddie.
Contents
Copyright
“No leaves, Oona, I can’t eat leaves”
It was as I was riding up there on the elephant, swaying in the sun, that Dad’s elephant joke came into my mind. Usually I can’t remember jokes, but I always remembered this one, maybe because Dad told it so often. I knew it word for word, just as he’d tell it.
“You know the one about the elephant and the bananas, Will?” he’d begin, and without waiting for an answer, off he’d go. “A man and a boy were sitting opposite one another in this railway carriage – they were travelling between Salisbury and London. On his lap, the man had a huge paper bag full of bananas. But soon enough, the boy noticed that something very strange was going on here. The man wasn’t eating the bananas. Instead, every few minutes, he’d just stand up, open the window, and throw one of them out. Of course, the boy couldn’t understand what he was doing this for. He kept trying to puzzle it out. So in the end, he just had to ask.
“’Scuse me,” he says, “but could you tell me why you’re throwing all those bananas out of the window?”
“To keep the elephants away,” replies the man. “Cos elephants is very dangerous, y’know.”
“But there aren’t any elephants around here anyway,” says the boy.
“Course there aren’t,” the man tells him, throwing yet another banana out of the window. “But that’s only cos of my bananas. If I didn’t keep doing this, there’d be millions of them out there, squillions. And elephants is very dangerous, y’know.”
