Jody bounds along the sandy track, jumps onto a flat rock, and throws both arms wide. “Behold! The first stop on our Land Animal Walk!” Her binoculars bounce against her coral shirt. “It needs excitement. Mystery. Possibly trumpets.”

Raymond pushes his amber glasses up his nose. “We don’t own trumpets.”

“Then we need an animal that makes trumpet noises.”

Instead, they find poo.

Chunky, brown, cube-shaped droppings cover the track beside the bush camp. Some sit on stones. Others perch on fallen branches like very unpleasant chocolates.

Raymond crouches. “Why are they square?”

“Maybe a wallaby swallowed building blocks,” Jody says. She opens their battered field journal and sketches a cube with stink lines.

Alma, the park ranger, waits nearby beneath a gum tree. “What can the clues tell you?” she asks. “Observe from a safe distance, and don’t touch droppings with bare hands.”

Raymond grins. “Good thing I brought the Rolling Dropping Measurer.”

From his gadget pouch, he produces a tiny wheeled frame with two rulers and a long handle. He lowers it around one cube. The wheels wobble. The frame spins backward, escapes his hand, and rattles downhill.

“Your measurer is measuring its freedom!” Jody cries.

They chase it around grass clumps, under a bench, and straight into a bush. When Raymond pulls it free, three burrs cling to his windbreaker, and one sits on his head like a prickly crown.

“First challenge,” he says solemnly. “Defeated by gravity.”

They decide not to disturb the droppings. Instead, Jody sketches their size beside a drawn pencil, while Raymond records where each cube lies.

Soon, he notices something odd. “They aren’t scattered randomly. Most are on top of things—rocks, logs, even that old boot someone used as a flowerpot.”