Chapter 8
Ms. Frizzle and her class continued their ride in the Magic School Safari Van as they had their lunch. They saw some more giraffes and rhinos along the way and even a few impalas as they trundled along, but the best was yet to come. As Ms. Frizzle pulled the bus-van to a stop under a tree, the class saw a large bird with a pale-pink head and dark feathers covering its body. The large creature was pacing around a clutch of eggs that were each the size of a football.
"Take a look at this father ostrich, class!" chortled Ms. Frizzle as she slowed the bus-van.
Ralphie quickly snapped a few photos of the ostrich as well as the eggs it was guarding while Tim began getting down a full drawing of the scene as it unfolded. While he was doing so, Tim said, "Man, those are definitely the size of eggs I'd want on my breakfast plate."
"They kinda remind me of the egg Dr. Skeledon gave to me to protect during our dinosaur field trip," mused Arnold. "Do you think so too, Ms. Frizzle?"
"An eggs-cellent comparison, Arnold," replied the Friz. "And to this day, the ostrich is considered the layer of the largest eggs in the animal kingdom. Very befitting for the world's biggest bird."
After their visit to the ostrich's nest, Ms. Frizzle's class moved on across the African plains until a sound they hadn't heard before made their stomachs flip inside them. It was a long, drawn-out howling that was unfamiliar to them back home in Walkerville, and the kids caught the shivers.
"Oh, no!" moaned Keesha.
"Is it a wolf pack?" shuddered Phoebe.
"I thought there were no wolves in Africa!" groaned Wanda.
Ms. Frizzle was merely smiling and said, "Nothing to worry about, class. While there are no wolves in this part of the world, you'll find plenty of dogs roaming around on the savannah."
Ms. Frizzle was correct, for she drove a little further on until she directed her students to a pack of dogs that were crowded around the body of one that had died recently. Dorothy Ann looked through her book once more and said, "It's a pack of African wild dogs, guys. And it looks like this pack is mourning their alpha."
The class sat there and watched as the dogs remained where they were, howling and moaning for their late leader. Then after five minutes, the wild dogs moved off to wherever their den was, and the kids then saw a flock of vultures circling about before landing. They started picking apart the body of the African wild dog, but they weren't alone, for a group of larger birds with longer beaks flapped down from the sky and stood a short distance away.
"What kind of vultures are those, Ms. Frizzle?" asked Keesha.
"Actually, Keesha, those aren't vultures," explained Ms. Frizzle. "These particular birds are marabou storks. They feed on whatever meat vultures leave behind from their meals as they are scavengers and allow the grass to grow green again."
Ralphie snapped some pictures of the storks before the Magic School Safari Van continued trundling across the African savannah, and as the day turned to afternoon, they saw a few dozen more of some of the animals they had encountered earlier on their field trip, but Keesha notice a gray-feathered bird with a red beak flying alongside the bus-van and she said, "Hey, what kind of bird is that?"
"That is a red-billed hornbill, Keesha," replied Ms. Frizzle. "They aren't birds of prey, but they are omnivorous, eating fruits, plants, and the smaller mammals of the plains."
The class was excited enough to get a look at the hornbill, but there wasn't much else to do for the next few minutes, so some of the class fell asleep under the shade of the bus-van's awning. By two o'clock, the bus-van pulled to a stop out in the plains, and Ms. Frizzle called happily, "Wake up, class! We're here!"
The kids followed their teacher from the Magic School Safari Van and found themselves standing before a rock formation that rose from the ground like an island in the sea of grass. It was enormous, about the size of an apartment complex, and trees and bushes grew between the great stones and surrounded the base. To the kids, it looked like a small mountain.
"What a cool rock!" Arnold mused.
"Here in Africa, it's one of many, Arnold," said the Friz. "It's called a kopje."
A sound filled the air that was more felt than heard: a deep, throaty roar. Ms. Frizzle's students looked around for the source of the sound, and then Carlos pointed to the kopje and called out, "Hey, guys! Check it out!"
The other students looked toward the large mound of rocks and saw the most incredible sight yet. A male lion was sitting on its haunches, looking over the grassland in a manner that the class couldn't deny seemed royal. He wasn't alone either, for fourteen lionesses were there, licking at their tawny fur, and the class counted twelve lion cubs.
"Wow!" mused Ms. Frizzle's class.
Their teacher fondly said, "I've saved the best for last, class. We humans may be the most populous species of our world, but those who live in the wild rule the wild. And here, there's none better than a pride of lions; the true rulers of the African wilderness."
"Do lions really have a king?" Phoebe inquired.
Ms. Frizzle laughed. "Not in any way we know, Phoebe. But they do have a leader. He's called the alpha, and he holds all power in a lion pride. His job is to protect his pride from all trespassers, and very few animals have the courage to match a lion."
The class watched the lions lounging on their castle of stone for a few minutes when there came another roar from a distance. Coming up seemingly from the ground was a group of ten other lionesses, two of whom were each dragging a wildebeest by the neck. The class watched as the big male and the rest of the pride began cantering down the kopje with the cubs gently carried in the mouths of their mothers.
For a while, the class simply stood there and watched as the lionesses presented their catch to the alpha lion, who began tearing into the meat of the first wildebeest and managed to finish about half of it. As soon as the male ate his fill, the females tore off strips of meat from both wildebeests and shared in their meal before tearing off smaller portions to feed their cubs.
Ralphie snapped pictures of the lion pride while Tim got busy drawing pictures of the enormous felines. Wanda couldn't take her eyes off the lions as they ate, and she wondered, "How much can a lion eat in one meal, Ms. Frizzle?"
"Oh, about fifteen pounds worth, with plenty of leftovers if the prey is larger than a wildebeest," replied Ms. Frizzle helpfully.
"That's a full seven kilograms worth of meat!" added Phoebe. Her friends wondered how she knew it until they remembered that at Phoebe's old school, she learned to measure in metric units.
"In human terms, a lion's lunch would be like eating over 200 hamburgers," said Dorothy Ann. "And after a meal that big, the best thing to do is to sleep."
However, the class got an unexpected surprise when a handful of the cubs came plodding toward them, having caught their scent. For a moment, the kids trembled, thinking that the bigger lions would attack if they thought their little ones were in danger. But it never came, for suddenly, a handful of the cubs began to romp and play with Ms. Frizzle's students as if they were nothing more than large house cats.
Phoebe was surrounded by four cubs, who nuzzled their faces into hers and gave off purring sounds as they climbed into her lap while their mothers watched. The young girl beamed as one cub crawled onto her shoulders and licked her face. And Phoebe wasn't the only student being thronged by lion cubs. One cub hopped into Arnold's hands and nuzzled the boy, at one point pawing at his nose, resulting in Arnold's glasses dropping onto its little head. While Carlos and Wanda each tried to match the pace of one cub that let them follow, another one found its way into Dorothy Ann's arms and made the brainy blonde giggle as it pawed her pigtails.
While the class was engaged in this surprisingly tender moment, they noticed a few other cubs romping with one another and with their mothers. Ms. Frizzle explained that this was the way lion cubs learn to hunt and survive in the wild.
"Cubs will be cubs, but even in play, they learn to be big lions," she said with a smile.
Suddenly, there came a sound of cackling that the class recognized from the night before. Hyenas! At that moment, a small pack of hyenas on the hunt was moving into the pride's territory, and they looked pretty hungry. However, the lion pride had seen them first, and they moved into action.
As the hyenas ran toward the cubs that weren't near the class, the mother lions snarled and ran at them. They pushed the hyenas away and attempted to bite them if they tried to get near the cubs. Ms. Frizzle and her class didn't have long to get the cubs who were playing with them back to their mothers, for some more hyenas were approaching quickly.
"We're surrounded!" Ralphie exclaimed in a panic.
"Oh, bad! Oh, bad! Oh, bad, bad, bad!" moaned Keesha.
"What are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? What are we gonna DO?" cried Wanda.
Ms. Frizzle simply stood by her students and said, "Well, as I always say, 'What's a lion without loyalty?'"
The class then got a surprise as more lionesses attacked the hyenas as they prepared to attack the cubs that were with Ms. Frizzle's class. They bit and clawed and kicked and sent the hyenas running for their lives while Ms. Frizzle directed her class to the rest of the lion pride so their cubs could rejoin them. In seconds, most of the hyenas were backing away from the snarling lions. But some of them weren't willing to back down without a fight. That's when one of the hyenas who was still up and fighting noticed Phoebe trying to catch up with the rest of her class with a single lion cub in her arms. The remaining hyenas decided to go for her, and the poor girl ran as fast as her legs could carry her. However, Phoebe was in such a hurry to rejoin her classmates that she tripped on a rock in her path and nearly lost the cub who was clinging to her.
"Do something, Ms. Frizzle!" cried Ralphie. "Phoebe's gonna be a hyena's lunch!"
"Not if he has any say in it, Ralphie," replied Ms. Frizzle, pointing with a smile.
The class had no idea what their teacher meant, but they soon found out. Before the snarling hyenas could get any closer to Phoebe, there came a strong, fierce roar that made the creatures stop in their tracks. Suddenly, the male lion leapt into attack and began swatting the hyenas down like flies. He clawed them, bit them, and pounced on them, and in only twenty seconds, the battle was over. The hyenas scampered away, yelping in fear, and Ms. Frizzle's class cheered as Phoebe handed male's cub to him and was rewarded with a surprisingly peaceful nuzzle.
As the lions moved back to their dwelling among the rocks, Phoebe then found herself engulfed in a sea of hugs by her friends, and Arnold cheered, "You were so brave, Phoebe!"
"You know, I don't think those hyenas wanted to attack me anyway," replied Phoebe."They just wanted an easy lunch, but they chose the wrong place to look for it."
Tim then said, "Well, judging from the sketching I've been doing and how we've been keeping track, it looks like the plant-eating animals here far outnumber the meat-eaters substantially."
"And the ones that do eat meat like lions and cheetahs and crocodiles aren't bloodthirsty monsters," added Keesha. "They're only doing what they need to in order to live."
"And even though the plant-eaters are prey, they aren't weak," Phoebe said smartly. "They can run from their predators, hide from them, and even intimidate them. And the animals that eat dead animals like vultures and hyenas aren't loathsome, disgusting creeps. They're just keeping the savannah clean and allowing the plant-eaters and meat-eaters to thrive here."
Ms. Frizzle then approached with a beaming face and said to her students, "All true, Phoebe. And even more wonderful is how all these amazing animals get along; speed, strength, stamina, camouflage, sticking together, or facing their troubles alone. And together, these wonders of nature and more are what make Africa such a wondrous place."
The class beamed and embraced their dear teacher as they watched the lion pride congregate at the top of the kopje. Then the male lion let out a roar that echoed around the area and made the kids' hearts rumble inside them. The lionesses raised their voices in response, and Ms. Frizzle's class all cheered. Then at last, Ms. Frizzle turned the Magic School Safari Van into a jet plane. It was time to go home.
As the bus-plane took off, Ralphie promised to get the pictures he took developed and bring them to class the next day. Tim shared his sketches with the other students, and Phoebe couldn't help smiling as she remembered how those little lion cubs frolicked around her so lovingly. The class knew that it would be hard to explain their field trip to their parents, but they would be so impressed with how much their kids had learned about the wondrous wildlife of Africa.
A/N: And thus concludes another wonderful field trip with Ms. Frizzle and her class. Hope you all enjoyed this story, and keep an eye out for more Disney content, DC Comics, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and a little bit more. And remember what makes the wildlife of Africa so marvelous, folks:
"It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle,
The Circle of Life!"