Have you ever wondered where the sun goes when it wants to take a nap? Or why the moon looks like a sleepy eye opening slowly in the dark? Jerome wondered about these things every day.

Jerome was a young emu with long, knobby legs and a neck that wiggled like a rubber hose. He lived in the red dusty bushland where the heat made the air shimmy and shake.

Jerome had a big dream. He wanted to see the Dreamtime River. His elders told him, "Jerome, the river flows across the sky when the world is dark. It is a path of light where the ancestor spirits hum the world to sleep."

But Jerome had a problem. A very silly problem for an adventurer. He was a champion sleeper. As soon as the sun touched the horizon—*honk-shoo!*—Jerome was fast asleep.

"Not tonight," Jerome declared one warm evening, puffing out his feathery chest. "Tonight, I will stay awake. I will see the glowing water in the sky."

The sun began to dip low, painting the sky with orange and pink. Jerome felt his eyelids getting heavy, like they had little pumpkins sitting on them. He blinked slowly. The world was getting fuzzy.

"I must stay awake!" he squawked to himself.

To stop himself from sleeping, Jerome decided to do something silly. He tried to stand on just one leg, like the storks in the billabong. He lifted his left foot. He leaned. He wobbled. *Boing!* His long neck swung around like a loose lasso. *Thump!* He fell right on his fluffy bottom, kicking up a cloud of red dust that made him sneeze.

*Ah-choo!*

From a branch above, a Kookaburra laughed. It wasn't a polite chuckle. It was a loud, belly laugh that echoed through the trees. "Koo-koo-ka-ka! Silly Jerome! Why are you dancing like a broken puppet?