Tiger Trap Read Online Free PDF

joeys.”
    “Joeys? You named them both Joey?” Nick said, saying almost the same words I’d used myself.
    “Don’t be ridiculous!” I snapped. “Baby kangaroos are called joeys. I thought
everybody
knew that.” There was no way I was going to admit I didn’t know that myself until yesterday. Part of the job of being a big sister was knowing things that your little brother didn’t know. The other part of the job was letting him
know
you knew things he didn’t and acting superior.
    “Okay, Sarah, let’s hear it,” Nick said.
    “Hear what?”
    “Hear everything you know about kangaroos that I don’t.”
    Apparently, Nick
did
know my job, too.
    “Well?” Nick prodded.
    “What would you like to know?” I’d spent some time, between feedings, surfing the Net to find out more kangaroo facts and information.
    “Just the
Reader’s Digest
version — big stuff, important and interesting stuff.”
    “Okay. Kangaroos are from Australia.”
    “Even I know that,” Nick said.
    “They’re marsupials, which means the females have pouches and they carry their young in those pouches.”
    “Gee, I know that, too,” Nick said. “Maybe you don’t know anything about them that I don’t know.”
    Okay, if he wanted to be that way. “And I guess, of course, you know how many species of kangaroo there are, right?”
    “A bunch,” Nick said.
    “Forty-seven is the correct number, ranging in size from the smallest, the rock wallaby, up to the largest, the red kangaroo, which stands as tall as one point eight metres and can weigh up to one hundred and forty kilograms.”
    “Wow, that’s big! I’d hate to meet up with a herd of them.”
    “A herd? What do you think they are — cows?”
    “I don’t know what you call a lot of kangaroos,” Nick said.
    “I do,” I said smugly. “You call them a mob, and they can be large. It would be impressive to see them travelling. They can go as fast as seventy kilometres an hour. The big males can cover up to nine metres in one bound.”
    Nick whistled. “These guys will be able to jump that far someday?”
    “Someday. The red kangaroo, or as it’s called in Latin, the
Macropus rufus
, is an impressive animal.” I didn’t know if I’d said that correctly, but Nick wouldn’t know if I made up words and said them in
pig
Latin. “
Rufus
, of course, means red, and
macro
refers to the largest. A female kangaroo is called a doe, flyer, roo or jill, and the male is called a buck, boomer or jock. And, of course, the baby, as
everybody
knows now, is called a joey.”
    “So if they’re not called Joey, what are their names?” Nick asked.
    “Officially, they don’t have names, but I sort of named them. This one,” I said, pointing at the slightly bigger of the two, “is Kanga. And the other one is called —”
    “Roo!” both my mother and brother said in unison.
    “Yeah. The kangaroos from
Winnie the Pooh
are the only ones I know.”
    “They’re not very big,” my mother said. “How old are they?”
    “It’s hard to say, maybe four months. Do either of you know how big a kangaroo is at birth?”
    “No, but I’m sure you’ll tell us,” Nick said.
    “Do you want to hear or don’t you?” I asked.
    He nodded.
    “When they’re first born, they’re as small as this,” I said, holding my fingers about two centimetres apart.
    “Come on, no way,” Nick said.
    “It’s true. They crawl up through their mother’s fur and climb into her pouch. They stay in there, nursing, growing, until they become big enough to peek out. Altogether a joey is about eight months old before he completely abandons his mother’s pouch.”
    “So these two should still be with their mother,” my mother said.
    “They should be. They would be … if she were still alive.”
    “What happened to her?” Nick asked.
    “I don’t know exactly. I just know the place they were keeping them wasn’t very good. You know how bad some of these places can be.”
    “So …” my