Sonning Hood

When Polar and Grizzly went home from Nottingham, I was left in charge of Uppie for a few days.  I had plenty of bear food - grapes, herby crackers and nice, crunchy biscuits - so I could have stayed aboard and read my bear-sized Observer's books, but I wanted to explore.

Nottingham is a very big city but as it is very busy, I thought it should be quite easy for a small bear to make his way along the towpath and into town without being seen.  It was easy to avoid humans but there were lots of noisy, argumentative Canada Geese on the towpath, who tried to peck my ears and tail, which wasn't very nice of them. 

There were rats too.  I was very nervous when I saw the rats but they were actually very friendly.  They said they were lucky that people in their home city kept alive the memory of a local hero called Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich to give to the poor, as they lived by gathering up waste food dropped for them by kind humans and giving it to their babies.

'There's a statue of Robin Hood up by the castle,' they told me, and they showed me the way to get there, leading me past some huge old warehouses that were now pubs and clubs and restaurants.  According to the rats, it was a very good area to find free food as drinking lots of beer made humans buy more food but eat less of it.

We had to be very careful crossing some busy roads but there were lanes and back alleys we could use to get up to the castle, where the rats showed me their human heroes, the statues of Robin Hood and his friends.  They showed me where to get into the castle too.  I was small enough to squeeze under the gates and climbed up on the walls to get a view across the whole city, before taking a stroll around inside, where there is a gallery full of clever and beautiful things humans have made and painted.

'As there are so many people, there must be lots of small bears in Nottingham too,' I thought, but I had no idea where to find them.  I looked in the caves underneath the castle, but there were no bears there.

I scurried further along the towpath, where some nice people from the Inland Waterways Association and Canal and River Trust were busy dredging out litter, but there were no bears there either.   There was an awful lot of junk, however.  Sometimes humans can be very messy and wasteful!

I even looked along the banks of the big River Trent itself, but there were still no other small bears to be seen.  By the end of the day, I had wandered much further than I meant to and I thought I would have a very long walk home, until I noticed a lot of people waiting on a raised pavement.

'What are they doing?' I asked a pigeon.

'Waiting for the tram,' she said.  She explained that trams were like trains that ran on rails through streets and, because she had seen the city from the air, she could tell me which tram went closest to the canal and how many stops I should count before getting off.

I was so intrigued by the tram that I sat quietly in one corner and went past my stop and all the way out to the terminus before coming back into the city.  I hoped some of the human cubs getting on and off might have bears I could talk to, but I didn't see any at all.   

'Never mind,' I said to myself.  'I'll go back to Uppie and talk to my rat friends.'  Because bears have good noses, I could smell when I was close to the canal again, so jumped off the tram near the towpath and ran back to the boat through the crowds heading for the pubs and clubs of the waterfront.

The rats were pleased I had enjoyed such an interesting day.  They invited me to have dinner with them, as they had found a big polystyrene box full of chips and a half-eaten burger, but I politely excused myself as I had plenty of fresh food on Uppie. 

When Polar and Grizzly came back, I told them I had been exploring with help from my rat friends and I told them about Robin Hood and how, although he was an outlaw, he had looked after poor people.  As I was very interested in his story, Polar made me a Robin Hood costume of my own but said she didn't think it was a good idea for me to have a bow and arrows inside the boat.

I think she was probably right about that!