Freya was so taken with the chicks and their eagerness to learn that she asked the magic carpet for some teaching supplies. The carpet was now very obliging as it had learned its lesson and we had lavished it with compliments. We did appreciate the carpet and could have achieved nothing without its help. The carpet told us it loved having us as passengers. It felt grateful that unlike other magic carpets, it wasn’t being forced to obey unsavoury characters or fulfil the dreams of the greedy. The carpets had held a union meeting in the last few days to try to work out how they could refuse inappropriate requests to help the undeserving.
The carpet magically produced several solid wooden easels and a batch of painting materials and tools for making drawings and paintings. Freya set to work in front of an enraptured audience of emu chicks. They had never seen an easel before, or paints, or paintings, so it seemed like magic to them. They were much more impressed than they had been watching the carpet unload food and drink supplies or the various tents the cats had used.
Freya sketched a lion’s head.
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The chicks were fascinated when Freya described how large a lion was compared to them and how its roar was so loud it was terrifying. She didn’t want them to be too frightened.
Then she painted an elephant. The whole elephant was hard to paint, perhaps because it was so large. Freya concentrated hard and made four paintings. They looked primitive to her, more like a kitten’s drawings. But the emus were frightfully impressed. When she had finished, she asked the chicks to make some paintings of creatures they knew.
The emu chicks were quickly engrossed in their drawings. They worked intently for a little while and then asked Freya to view the results. She was amazed. Some of these little birds were talented. They were so observant of detail. Some of the paintings were more abstract.
The little birds were so pleased with their efforts they called their father to look at their work. The big bird looked stunned. He had never seen anything like it. Freya had to stop him from pecking one of the kangaroos, it was so lifelike. The chicks ran around making a whistling sounds. Later on, Freya packed up the paintings as there was nowhere for the emus to keep them safe.
