Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [39]
Tau duck 5
Dong tao chicken 4
Red‐eared slider 40
Chinese three‐striped box turtle 350
Forest dragonfly 150
Phorusrhacos 450
Steller’s sea cow 1000
ELEVEN
The TARDIS had landed in a cul‐de‐sac, a narrow side street filled with puddles and rubbish. Martha hurried to the end of the passageway, expecting to see screaming men, women and children running this way and that, arms waving above their heads and eyes wide in terror. But no. The only waving arms belonged to a woman trying to catch the attention of someone the other side of a road, the only wide eyes belonged to a couple of teenage girls watching a couple of teenage boys walk past.
They were in a town – ahead was the high street by the look of things – and almost certainly somewhere in the UK. It wasn’t especially futuristic – no hover‐cars or moving pavements – and it wasn’t at all unrecognisable from places of Martha’s own time, there were boutiques, coffee shops and newsagents – although these days, judging by the shop windows, fluorescent green leg warmers were currently in fashion, a cinnamon‐orange latte cost €11.50, and some celeb had run off with some other celeb’s wife.
The Doctor shut the TARDIS doors and joined her, and they wandered off down the street together.
‘So,’ said Martha, ‘what do we do now? What are we looking for?’
He shrugged. ‘The pendant should have given the TARDIS something to work on, should have brought us to a set of relevant coordinates, a place where some creature came from. But could be anything. You know, this would almost certainly have been all forest once. Trees instead of telegraph poles. Bushes instead of bins. And of course whatever was picked up from here originally could be virtually undetectable, could be a microbe, a gnat, a flea…’
‘Or that!’ Martha rolled her eyes. Talk about déjà vu!’ No one else could have spotted it, because it wasn’t as if a bizarre‐looking bird bigger than a turkey was likely to pass without comment. It was poking its head round a rubbish bin, pushing its enormous hooked beak into a fast‐food container that hadn’t quite made it inside the receptacle, and seemed remarkably unfazed by the human hustle and bustle surrounding it. It was a dodo.
The Doctor and Martha approached, gingerly. ‘Don’t scare it!’ Martha whispered, creeping forwards on tiptoes.
The dodo didn’t run away, just pulled its head out of the cardboard box, spilling ancient French fries across the pavement as it did so, and looked at them with curious eyes as they reached it. Martha came to a halt. ‘Now what?’ she hissed at the Doctor, not having thought any further than getting as close to it as possible.
‘Back to the TARDIS,’ he whispered back. ‘Keep it safe.’ She held out a hand, with vague thoughts of how you let dogs or horses sniff you, and the bird waddled towards her, still unafraid. By now one or two people had turned to look, and the Doctor said loudly, ‘Ah, there you are, Dorothea. Got lost again! Giant Peruvian flightless homing pigeon,’ he added to a staring old lady with a shopping basket on wheels. ‘Probably got a bit confused by the one‐way system. Come on, girl! Home’s this way!’
The dodo – and Martha couldn’t fathom why the Doctor had decided to call it Dorothea – stuck close to her side as they made their way back to the TARDIS. There was something else she couldn’t work out: ‘I thought I’d just put everything in reverse, sent things back to where they came from. But the dodo didn’t come from here, it came from Mauritius. And it wasn’t found anywhere else, that’s what your ISpyder book says.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Good point. But sailors did carry them off: brought them back home as curiosities, displayed them to the sensation‐seeking public for a groat a go. In London in 1638 you could spend a fun afternoon out watching a dodo eat stones as big as nutmegs. Wouldn’t be the first species which died out in captivity, not by a long chalk.’ His gaze drifted to the middle distance. ‘Last ever Tasmanian Tiger, Beaumaris Zoo, 1936. Neglected and