Rescue On Nim's Island (3 page)

The twins screwed up their faces.

‘He’s so ugly!’ said Tiffany.

Selkie huffed crossly.

‘Wow! I didn’t know seals had such bad breath!’ Tristan exclaimed.

Nim had never imagined that someone could come to her island and not like it. She’d thought the twins were going to be friends! Fury, hot as Fire Mountain, bubbled and rose inside her. She could feel the lava-words ready to explode from her mouth.

She ran down the beach, past Edmund, and dived off the rocks.

The water was cool and welcoming. Nim swam hard and fast, until the peaceful waves rocked her into calm. The funny faces of clownfish darting between fronds of coral made her smile. She rolled over and floated on her back with the warm sun on her face, drifting wherever the waves wanted her to go.

Then a great brown body shot up beneath her, tumbling her over and around until Nim was swallowing ocean, coughing and spluttering. ‘I wasn’t going too far!’ she protested.

The sea lion kept on nudging. Nim looked out and saw that the beach was much further away than she wanted it to be.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘You were right.’

Selkie snorted, and dived under again. Nim slipped onto the sea lion’s back and clung tight as they glided through the waves, thumping over, ducking under. The world was the way it should be again.

Three more days
, she thought.
Then the visitors will all
go away and everything will be just the way it always is.

Selkie swam back towards her favourite rock and, with a last magnificent dive and splash, tumbled Nim onto the beach.

Edmund was there. He sat so still that a cormorant was standing beside him drying its wings, as if it hadn’t noticed this new human.

‘You know the coolest thing about you riding Selkie?’ he asked, as if he hadn’t been ignoring her half an hour ago. ‘She could be free – but she wants to stick around you.’

‘She is free!’ exclaimed Nim. ‘But she’s my friend – and she helped my dad look after me when I was a baby. Sometimes she forgets I’m not still a little sea lion pup.’

‘Did you used to be a little sea lion pup?’ asked Edmund.

Nim began to splutter, and then she laughed. They both laughed so long that Selkie got bored and swam away, and Fred scuttled across the beach towards them. He climbed to Nim’s shoulder and sneezed reproachfully at her.

Edmund laughed so hard he nearly fell off the rock.

J
ACK AND
N
IM
showed the scientists where to set up their camp on the grasslands near the beach. The Lowes had a big family tent for all five of them. Lance and Leonora had a tent that was nearly as big for the two of them, and Edmund had a little tent for himself.

‘Will you be nervous on your own?’ Anika asked him.

‘We’re right here if you need us,’ said Ryan.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Leonora, stroking her scorpion pendant. ‘Edmund knows we’re always keeping an eye on him.’

‘Thanks,’ said Edmund. ‘But I like being by myself.’

Tiffany rolled her eyes and whispered to Tristan. Tristan laughed.

‘Doesn’t everyone like being by themselves?’ asked Nim.

‘It’s a very important skill,’ said Anika. ‘Even if it’s hard for twins to believe it.’

Nim felt more muddled than ever. It was like watching a new flock of birds: she knew that there was a game going on, but she couldn’t work out the rules.

‘Now,’ said Leonora, ‘I’d like to ask Nim to be my guide around the island. I’m sure she knows every cave and crevice.’

Jack laughed. ‘She certainly does! But we’ll show you around all together. When everyone’s got a good idea of the island they can decide where they want to research tomorrow.’

‘Of course,’ said Leonora. ‘I mustn’t keep your clever young daughter all to myself.’

A puffer fish of pride swelled inside Nim: the beautiful biologist wanted to be her friend. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much that Tiffany and Tristan didn’t.

But Edmund was watching Leonora the way Fred watched a snake.

W
ALKING ON
S
HELL
Beach with other people was slow and strange. The jangle of voices filled Nim’s ears so she couldn’t hear the cry of birds or the shushing of the sea. Her toes didn’t notice the warm sand beneath them. But most of all her mind was too busy noticing what other people were doing to think her own thoughts.

Seeing Ollie riding on Ryan’s shoulders made her remember the safe excitement of riding on Jack’s. But when the little boy climbed higher to stand, wobbling dangerously as he grabbed his father’s head with one hand and pointed at a leaping dolphin with the other, Nim felt sad. She wished she could remember far enough back to hear her own mum saying, ‘Careful!’ and pulling her back to safety, the way that Anika was.

‘Is it just you and Jack on the island?’ Leonora asked, as if she was reading Nim’s mind.

And Alex Rover
, Nim nearly said, because the biologist’s voice sounded so kind that it was hard to lie.

‘For a long time,’ she said at last.

‘What about your mother?’ asked Lance.

His voice was silky smooth too, and Nim didn’t know why she really didn’t want to tell them about her mum.

Nim couldn’t remember her mother very well, but every morning she said hello to her picture. In the photograph, her mum looked happy-excited, because it was the day she went diving with a blue whale to investigate exactly what he was eating. Jack always said the experiment would have been all right, it should have been safe, except that the Troppo Tourists came in their huge pink-and-purple boat, racing around the whale and bumping its nose. The whale panicked and dived, so deep that no one ever knew where or when he came back up again.

Nim’s mother never came back up at all.

‘She died when I was a baby,’ said Nim, and Leonora laid a smooth, slim-fingered hand on her shoulder in sympathy.

Nim wasn’t used to other people touching her, even if they meant to be kind. The hairs on her arms prickled till she was as spiky as Fred. Behind her, Selkie barked twice. Nim rushed back and threw her arms around the sea lion’s warm neck. ‘Everything’s okay,’ she whispered, but Selkie whuffled and sniffed her as if Nim had been doing something dangerous.

‘Selkie wants me to walk with her,’ Nim called, as Jack led everyone up the point to Turtle Beach.

Selkie snorted yes.

Edmund was watching. He’d been walking a little way off from everyone else, not talking. ‘I’d forgotten how smart she was,’ he said.

Selkie looked at him and barked.

‘She wants you to walk with us,’ Nim interpreted.

‘Except she doesn’t really walk,’ said Edmund.

‘She galumphs,’ said Nim.

‘I’ve never met anyone else who galumphs,’ said Edmund. ‘It’s sad: Dr Ashburn told me that even though she’s working with algae now, sea lions are the reason she became a biologist. She was nearly as excited as me about coming here.’

‘And then she got so sick.’

Edmund nodded. ‘She was okay last night when she phoned to tell me what time to meet. She was going out to celebrate with Professor Hunterstone and some scientist friends. It’s weird that they both got so sick afterwards.’

‘Tragic,’ said Lance, popping up from behind a tussock.

S
ELKIE DECIDED SHE’D
had enough galumphing and slid back to the water. Every once in a while Nim saw her sleek dark head poking through the waves, keeping watch until the people were out of sight. A little while later she was waiting for them on the other side of the island.

Jack led the visitors wide around the rainforest to cross the mountain.

Nim was glad he’d chosen that trail, even though the ground was gravelly and black and the plants were grey spikes. Their house, his lab, and Alex Rover’s writing studio were hidden deep in the rainforest, and she didn’t want Tiffany and Tristan to be anywhere near her home.

Tiff-Tris
, their dad had called them. It made them sound smaller and cuter than they were: more like their little brother Ollie. He’d walked a long way along the cliffs by himself, but now Ryan was piggybacking him again, stepping carefully over the skidding, loose stones.

From the curve of the mountain, sometimes all they could see was the dense green rainforest. Other times there were gaps and they could see over the island and far out to sea. Edmund took picture after picture. Once they stopped to look down at a waterfall gushing from steep grey cliffs.

‘It looks different from up here,’ said Edmund, when he’d taken twenty pictures of the waterfall, the pond that it splashed into, the rock bridge that arched across the pond, and a few more of the cliffs.

Nim laughed. ‘It’s much prettier when you’re not falling into it!’

Tristan looked at them curiously, but they didn’t explain. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing to a hollow on the bare hill, not far below them. ‘It looks like the start of a tunnel.’

‘A water-tunnel,’ said Nim. ‘If it rains a lot, a waterfall comes out of it and runs into the big one on the cliffs.’

‘It better not rain while we’re here,’ sniffed Tiffany.

A short walk later they were on top of a hill of black boulders that tumbled down to a wilder sea. White-foamed waves sprayed rainbows as they crashed onto the rocks. The visitors gasped, and crept carefully down the trail with their backs to the hill. Jack was leading the way; Nim stayed at the rear to make sure no one slipped behind.

She had never walked so slowly, with so many stops. She’d never stood still in front of one of the shrubby trees growing out of the hill on the edge of the path. That was probably why she’d never felt the cold breeze coming out from behind it.

Nim knew every trail and every mood of her island. That’s what she thought. She knew that the breeze from the sea was cooler and fresher than the warm air, heavy with the scent of plants, wafting across the rainforest. She knew that the sun shining on the rocks warmed the air in front of them.

She absolutely knew that she should not be feeling a cold wind on her back. She ducked behind the tree.

In the rocky side of the hill, just waiting for her to find it, was a big-enough-to-climb-through hole. Nim stuck her head into the darkness. She could feel the emptiness and the cool, dank wind that blew through it.

It was like finding an egg from a bird she’d never seen before: a surprise gift from the island.

Nim had discovered a new cave.

Chapter 4

I
F
J
ACK HAD
been right in front of her, Nim would have called out. She might have even if it had been Leonora. But Tiffany was the last in the line before her, so Nim didn’t say anything. What if she was wrong, and this was only a hole in the rock, not a real cave? She had to know what it was before she could share it.

There wasn’t time for that now.

She rushed to catch up. The visitors were so nervous of falling off the narrow cliff path that they hadn’t even noticed she’d dropped behind.

‘This is what we’ve come to see!’ Jack announced, at the entrance to the Emergency Cave. Everyone followed him in except Tiffany. She stayed outside with her back pressed to the cliff wall, staring anxiously down at the sea.