The Wonder Girl of the Gobi
St. Paul’s Co-educational College Primary School, Isabel Cheung, Fiction: Group 1
D
uring the Yuan Dynasty, the Gobi Desert was a vast, arid land full of wavy golden sand
dunes. The caramel coloured hills and valleys stretched for miles and miles. Along the
edge of the desert, near the foot of the Tian Shan Mountains, were scattered bands of
Mongolian goat herders. They lived a rough, tough life of looking for patches of grass to
feed their goats. When food was scarce, they raided caravans returning from Arabia, filled with
exotic spices, cotton and silver.
Impish Izzie was a spunky, gifted goat girl. She named all of her goats and could recognize
each of them by the sound of their baa. With her sharp ears, enchanting whistle and turbo legs,
she lassoed all of them in before sunset every day. There wasn’t a boy who could out-herd Izzie.
She was too clever and nimble to lose any of her goats. Impish Izzie was the wonder girl of the
Gobi.
One day, Impish Izzie became fed up of catching goats. While digging her left foot into the
sand, she heard a squeak. She froze in her tracks. She kicked up some sand with her other foot
and heard a faint bark.
“How funny,” she thought.
Squeak, squeak. She shuffled her feet a few more times. Bark, squawk.
“How fun!” she giggled.
She twisted her hips into a boogie woogie. Skipping along the ridge, her feet produced a new
song. Pip, squeak. Bark, boom.
She leapt off the ridge, whooping for joy.
“Owww!” she yelped. Her buns were scorched. And stuck.
Izzie scooted down the dune by the seat of her pants, a few inches at a time. Grrr … Grrrrrrr …
Rrrrrroaaar. With each scoot, she heard a sound like the growl of a hungry bear.
Meanwhile, she felt the warm tickle of tiny grains of sand brushing over her face. Little gusts
of wind began to sweep up the sands, and the sands danced in circles around her. Before she knew
it, she had been whirled into a tremendous twister, propelling Impish Izzie hundreds of feet into
the sky. Higher and higher she rose. Whooping and hollering, she was spinning across the Gobi
desert, like an untamed horse. What a ride she had! She was having the time of her life.
Then, the sand storm suddenly died. Impish Izzie plummeted from the sky. She tried to
balance herself by splitting her arms and legs wide apart. She landed with a walloping THUMP.
When she landed, her legs carved a V-shaped trough in the ground. Nowadays, people call this
The Valley Of the Wonder Girl.
Of course, Impish Izzie was not hurt at all. She bounced up from her tumble and skipped back
to the Tian Shan Mountains to tell her tale. Riding this sand storm was a blast, but Impish Izzie
knew that a storm could never replace her beloved goats. To this day, she is known as the Wonder
Girl of the Gobi.
