The Polar Bear Explorers' Club by Alex Bell (books for 8th graders TXT) 📕

and a nasty-smelling box filled with round tins of Captain Filibuster’s Expedition-Strength Moustache Wax.

They also had a sack of iced gems, some salted beef, a box of mint cake, some tinned Spam, a cooking pot and a small knife. And a gramophone, for what that was worth (explorers liked to listen to some music of an evening). There was also a magnificent wickerwork picnic basket filled with silver cutlery, fine china plates stamped with the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club crest, a couple of bottles of champagne and glass flutes. No doubt the champagne was for toasting a particularly fantastic find or amazing scientific discovery. But the weapons and most of the food had been with the other sleds, or in the two bags they’d lost. They found a long, thin bag strapped to the back of the sled that they thought might hold arrows but, was in fact, a map tube, filled with rolled-up maps.

‘Maybe you can magic up some more of those polar beans,’ Stella suggested to Ethan glumly. She didn’t think she’d care much for food that was giggling and cartwheeling about whilst she was trying to eat it, though.

‘Maybe we should slaughter these useless wolves,’ Ethan replied. ‘At least they’d be some help to us then.’

Shay suddenly went very still. ‘Touch a single hair on the head of any one of these wolves,’ he said in a dangerously quiet voice, ‘and I promise you will get to see my not-so-nice side. And you won’t enjoy that one bit.’

‘Oh, calm down, I didn’t mean it,’ Ethan snapped. ‘Who wants to eat wolf meat anyway? Gross! Still, I suppose it will fall to me to prevent us all from starving to death out here in this forsaken frozen wasteland. It’s fortunate for you lot that I’m here or you’d all be dead within the hour.’

‘Oh, it takes longer than an hour to starve,’ Beanie hurried to reassure him. ‘Much longer.’

The magician glanced at Beanie, then looked at Stella and said, ‘Perhaps you might come in handy with that compass of yours.’ He indicated Shay and said, ‘And he can look after the wolves he loves so much, I suppose. But what use is this one to anybody?’ He pointed at Beanie. ‘What’s he training to be? Bait?’

‘A medic,’ Stella snapped. ‘As you well know. So you’d better start being nice to him because if a yeti bites your arm off during the expedition then Beanie is the one who’ll be sewing it back on.’

‘You can’t sew an arm back on, Stella,’ Beanie said with a frown. ‘A finger, perhaps, but definitely not an arm. But if anyone loses any fingers or toes then I’ll sew them back on. Gladly.’

Ethan shook his head. ‘You have to be extremely intelligent to be a medic; everyone knows that. If you’re a medic, then I’m a ballerina!’

‘Oh!’ Beanie suddenly looked excited. If there was one thing he loved more than jellybeans and narwhals, it was the ballet. ‘That’s wonderful! Although haven’t the dance academy tried to correct your slouching? You don’t meet slouching ballerinas too often, and you slouch something terrible.’

Stella inwardly sighed. Poor Beanie. It never occurred to him to say anything other than exactly what he thought, without pausing to make his words softer or more palatable first. ‘But that would be like lying,’ he’d said when Stella had tried to talk to him about it once. ‘It’s not right to lie.’

Ethan drew himself up to his full height. ‘I don’t slouch, and I’m not a ballerina!’

Beanie looked more confused than ever. ‘But you just said—’

‘You might as well be a ballerina for all the use you are,’ Stella cut in. ‘Beanie is a junior medic and he has healing magic, which is a lot more valuable than creating polar beans out of thin air. He helps his mum at the hospital all the time back home, and she says he’s already more use than most of the doctors, and can tie bandages as well as any of the nurses.’

‘I wouldn’t trust him to tie his own shoelaces!’ Ethan scoffed.

Stella tightened her hands into fists to stop herself from doing something she shouldn’t. Poking the magician in the eye, for example. Or flicking his pointed nose as hard as she could.

Ethan pointed at Beanie’s bag and said, ‘What have you got in there? If you’re really training to be a medic, then your club would have given you a medical kit. Let’s see it.’

Beanie obligingly opened up his bag, which seemed to contain a lot of jellybeans stored by colour in glass jars. But, after digging around, he produced the medical kit, which came in a pale blue pack, with the Polar Bear Explorers’ Club crest stamped on the front. Stella had never seen one before, and peered forwards curiously as Beanie unzipped it.

She wasn’t quite sure what she expected to see. Rolls of bandages, perhaps, or various salves and ointments. Instead, when Beanie pushed back the lid, the pack was empty except for what looked like two miniature dog kennels, about the size of Stella’s hand. Everyone frowned down at them.

‘What are they, for heaven’s sake?’ Ethan demanded.

Beanie tapped the roof of each kennel and instantly two miniature dogs, just a few inches long, came bounding out. They had thick, shaggy coats; pink tongues that lolled from their mouths in excitement; big, soppy faces; and little wooden barrels marked with a red cross tied around their collars.

‘That’s Murphy.’ Beanie pointed to one of the dogs. ‘And this is Monty. They’re brandy rescue dogs. The Polar Bear Explorers’ Club sends them out on expeditions because they say that a tot of brandy – that’s what they have in the barrels – will warm you up if you get lost in the snow.’ He frowned and added, ‘Actually, my medicine books say that drinking alcohol is the worst thing you can do if you get stuck in the snow, but I didn’t want the dogs to feel bad, so I thought I’d