Amphibian Read Online Free PDF Page B

trick question since there’s no J word for savannah. She said, ‘Phin, the answer is jungle. Just write
jungle
down.’ Then she walked back to her desk.
    I thought about not telling her that lions don’t live in the jungle because I could tell she was irritated with me. I knew this mainly because when she told me to write
jungle
, her eyelids fluttered and she took a deep breath.
    I thought about it for a few seconds. I remembered what my mother had told me about how maybe I shouldn’t point out to Mrs. Wardman that she’s wrong when she’s wrong. But then I decided that she should know the right answer. She was the teacher and it wouldn’t be good if she was teaching everybody the wrong thing for years and years and years. So I raised my hand again.
    â€˜What is it, Phin?’ said Mrs. Wardman. She said this from her desk, which made what I had to say a little bit tricky. I didn’t want to say it out loud in front of everybody but now that I had raised my hand and she had answered, I had to say something.
    â€˜The answer to question seven can’t be jungle,’ I said, ‘because lions don’t live in the jungle. They live on the grasslands and savannah.’
    Then all of a sudden other words popped into my head, but they didn’t stay in my head. It was almost like they dropped down out of my brain and into the back of my throat and I had no choice but to spit them out – it was either that or choke. But after they came out, I immediately wanted to grab them from the air, shove them back into my mouth and swallow. But it was too late. The words ‘and frogs shouldn’t live in cages, they should live in wetlands’ were out into the air making their way to Mrs. Wardman’s ears and all I could do was hope for the best.
    Mrs. Wardman didn’t say anything for a few seconds. She just looked straight at me and then she said in a really low voice with her mouth hardly moving, ‘Phin, then just leave that one out, for pity’s sake.’ She didn’t say a thing about what I said about frogs.
    So I left the jungle answer out. I should have known it was going to be a stupid exercise. On the first page there was a picture of a polar bear and a penguin sitting on the same ice floe. On the same ice floe! They live on opposite ends of the world, for pity’s sake. Whatever that means.
    I couldn’t get to sleep last night at all. I tried to. I tried counting sheep. I got to 1,011, but then the sheep started bumping into the fence they were jumping over. I think that was because I was getting a bit tired and couldn’t make them jump high enough after about 1,000. When they hit the fence, they would fall down. That didn’t make me feel sleepy.
    Then I tried to think nice thoughts. I thought of the animals on Reull. I thought of Whirly Eye who has one big eye but also little eyes at the tips of his tentacles so that when he whirls around he can see in all directions. He is never surprised by what may be around a corner because all he does is put out one of his tentacles to look for danger. Whirly Eyes have predators but they’re hardly ever caught, not even at night, because the eyes take turns sleeping – half of them sleep during the daytime and half during the night.
    That made me think of dolphins here on earth. The left and right sides of a dolphin’s brain take turns sleeping so that one part can watch for danger. Whales and seals and manatees do this too but no other mammals do.
    There are thirty-five different species in the family
Delphinidae
and five of them are critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable on the Red List of Threatened Species. Most of the others could be in big trouble too but scientists don’t have enough information about them to know for sure.
    Lots of different species of birds can sleep one half a brain at a time. The eye that is controlled by the part of the brain that is awake stays