Rescue On Nim's Island (15 page)

A
LEX RAN OUT
of her studio so fast she didn’t have time to shut the door. She was running down the narrow path towards the trail to the house, faster than she’d ever known she could. Nim was in danger.

She was trying to think as she ran but Alex wasn’t very good at doing two things at once, especially if one of them was running.
Get the satellite phone and call Jack to come
home!
That was easy to think. So was
Keep Nim away from
Leonora and Lance!

The tricky part was that first, she had to find Nim. Or find Leonora and Lance and then work out how to keep them away from Nim.

Alex was thinking-and-running so hard that she didn’t have time to look around when she reached the main trail. She didn’t see the boy with a smaller boy on his back running as hard as he could up from the creek towards her.

Tristan skidded to a stop, Alex crashed into him, and they all tumbled to the ground. Luckily Ollie ended up on top.

‘Are you Alex Rover?’

‘Yes,’ Alex gasped. She waited for the boy to say, ‘But you’re not a man!’ Or: ‘You’ve got the same name as the great adventure writer!’

‘Tiffany needs help. We need our parents to come back now.’

Alex pointed towards the house. She was still panting too hard to speak, but she started running again. Tristan and Ollie followed.

‘S
ORRY,
SELKIE!’
N
IM
shouted.

‘How did she get down there?’ asked Edmund.

‘She was checking out the bat cave,’ said Nim. ‘There’s a big puddle inside it … that must be what’s below this shaft.’

‘So maybe we can get out that way too,’ said Edmund.

‘But I’m still stuck!’ Tiffany shrieked, desperately trying to yank free. There was more room now that the top rock was gone, but her foot was so swollen that it was still stuck firm.

Nim stared at the sneaker toe sticking through to her side of the tunnel. Suddenly she had an idea. Inside the first aid kit there was a bottle of Leonora’s soothing, slippery coconut oil.

She handed it through the window. As Edmund held the hammock steady, Tiffany reached for the bottle. Holding her breath to keep her hand from shaking, she trickled the oil down the crack into her sneaker.

When every drop was gone, she grabbed her leg just above her swollen ankle, pulled, twisted, and with a final yell, threw herself back into her hammock. Red and puffy, scraped and bloody, her foot popped out of its oily sneaker. ‘I’m free!’

Tiffany reached through the gap and held Nim’s hand; she held Edmund’s hand with her other and Edmund held Nim’s. It felt as if they were dancing in a circle, except that no one moved.

Then Fred sneezed, and from far below, Selkie barked sharply.

‘We’re coming!’ Nim shouted.

But they still had to work out how. Tiffany was too weak and wounded to climb.

‘I’ll see if we can get down the shaft to where Selkie is,’ said Edmund.

Nim loosened the rope tying him to the rock bar, and cleated it so he could lower himself a little way at a time instead of crashing to the bottom.

Edmund slithered down to the narrow part of the funnel. The opening was big enough for his feet to go through, but not the rest of him.

‘Watch out, Selkie!’ he shouted. Because it looked as if there were more loose rocks, like the one he’d kicked out when he was trying not to drown. He jumped and stamped; Nim checked that the rope was holding tight, and he jumped again.

A big rock broke free. They could hear it splash into the puddle at the bottom. A mini-avalanche of little ones plinked in after it.

‘There’s heaps of room now!’ Edmund called up. Nim measured out more rope so he could go further.

Then Tiffany watched from her hammock, Nim and Fred watched through the gap, Selkie waited at the bottom and Edmund slipped down the rope till one foot touched water and the other touched sea lion.

He was in a knee-deep puddle of water in a far corner of the bat cave. Glow-worms danced all around him, bats hung upside down above him, and in front of him the pond sparkled deep and blue.

‘We can do it!’ he shouted. He rubbed Selkie’s head thank you, and started back up the rope.

It wasn’t as easy as sliding down. He walked his legs up the sides of the shaft and hauled himself up on the rope, with Nim cleating it in from the top so he didn’t fall back down what he’d just climbed.

By the time he got there, Tiffany’s foot looked like a balloon with toes. It didn’t look like a foot that could brace itself against walls to climb down the shaft.

So they threaded the other end of the rope around her hammock and pulled it in tight till Tiffany was sitting up with her knees bent. They checked all the knots, tugged and pulled and checked again before they undid the backpack straps from the bar of rock.

Then with Edmund guiding the sheet-hammock as he slid down his own rope and Nim paying the hammock rope out through a pulley, they lowered Tiffany gently down the shaft to Selkie’s waiting back.

T
HE SEA LION
splashed gently forward until Tiffany could see the sky and the world beyond the cave. The water in the puddle was smelly, but Tiffany didn’t care – it was cool on her swollen, oily ankle. She rested her face against Selkie’s shoulder and felt her feet relax.

‘All clear!’ Edmund shouted up the shaft.

Nim untied the ends of the ropes. They snaked down with a splash.

That was when Tiffany realised that the water was getting warmer, fizzing and bubbling under her toes. ‘That’s weird!’ she said, but Edmund had his head in the shaft, untangling a loop of rope caught on a rock, and didn’t hear.

Tiffany was so tired she could hardly move, but she knew what she had to do. With trembling fingers, she reached for the water bottle on her belt.

High above, Nim had just finished packing up all the tools and extra bits when she noticed Tiffany’s empty sneaker still poking into her cavern.

Nim pulled it through the crack, but it was so slippery with the coconut oil that it slipped right out of her fingers into the puddle she was standing in. The water was cool, and up past Nim’s ankles, but she’d been in it for so long she’d forgotten about it.

By the time she’d fished the oily sneaker out, the water was fizzing and warm.

‘How did that happen?’ Nim exclaimed. Fred didn’t have any answers but Nim searched quickly through the tool bag for a test tube, because she knew Jack would have questions.

There were no test tubes, or bottles, or anything else to take a sample. Nim didn’t feel like exploring these tunnels and caves again for a very long time, but, ‘We’ll come back tomorrow,’ she said.

Hoisting the tool bag onto her back, she crawled out of the tunnel and down the rock bridge.

Selkie dived across the pool to meet her, barking happily, but there was no time for long sniffs and whuffles. They raced around the pond.

Tiffany was waiting in front of the bat cave, her face lifted to the sun as she breathed in the warm fresh air.

But after Nim got out the first aid box and helped her clean and bandage her wounded ankle and foot, Tiff was even paler than before.

Edmund was staring down the creek. Nim knew what he was thinking: there was no way Tiffany could walk over these rocks.

But Selkie had other ideas. She was looking at Nim, and nudging Tiffany.

‘Selkie wants you to ride her,’ said Nim.

Tiffany let her breath out in a long sigh of relief and excitement. ‘Truly?’

‘Truly,’ said Nim. She hugged Selkie for a moment, whispering, ‘I’m so proud of you!’ Tiffany handed her back the pocketknife, and Nim cut a piece of rope to loop around Selkie’s shoulders so Tiffany could hold on. Sea lions are slippery when they galumph, even when they’re not in the water.

That was when they heard a shout. ‘Tiff!’

Tristan was running towards them, with Ollie and Alex Rover a little way behind.

There was so much hugging, laughing and so many babbled questions – as well as a little bit of crying – that it took a while for anyone to understand what anyone else was saying.

‘Tiff’s foot’s too big,’ said Ollie. ‘It’s yucky.’

‘We need to get her back to the camp as fast as we can,’ agreed Tristan. Tiffany was lying with her face on Selkie’s neck, too tired to speak.

‘She’ll be better off at the house,’ said Alex.

‘The creek path is a long way for Tiffany to ride Selkie,’ said Nim. ‘It’ll be faster to take the short cut back through the rainforest to the Black Rocks. Jack could pick us up there in the boat.’

‘I don’t know if he’s got the message yet,’ said Alex. ‘He might be ages.’

‘What would your Hero do?’ Nim asked, because sometimes when things were bad, the only way she could work out what to do was to try to be an Alex Rover hero.

‘You’re Alex Rover?’ Tiffany demanded. ‘The real Alex Rover? I thought he was a man.’

‘I’m the real one,’ said Alex. ‘I just made up the hero.’

‘She’s definitely real,’ said Tristan.

Nim wasn’t listening. Alex Rover’s Hero moved fast and thought faster, but he never moved before he thought. He’d want to know exactly where he was, and exactly where everyone else was, before he went anywhere.

He’d climb a tree, like the one in front of her.

Nim grabbed a thick vine dangling off the huge tree, and swung hand over hand to climb the trunk. Through her spyglass, she could see a faint shape that could be Jack’s sail. But when she looked again she thought it might be just a patch of sunlight on the waves – and whatever it was, it was very far away.

She wriggled partway around the trunk. From here the sea was a darker blue; she could see the Black Rocks, and the little cove at the bottom of the cliff … and Ryan and Anika’s wooden fishing boat.

‘I wonder why Lance and Leonora didn’t leave after I blew up the cave?’ said Nim.

Selkie barked sharply, showing her teeth.

‘You chased them away,’ said Nim.

Selkie honked happily. Nim stroked her. She wished she knew where the Bijous were now, but the other thing Alex Rover’s Hero always said was to only worry about one thing at a time. Right now, that one thing was getting Tiffany down to the boat and back to safety.

O
UT ON THE
reef, in the deep dark blue of the ocean, Jack pulled up his anchor and turned the sailboat towards the island. Anika and Ryan sighed, happy to have been there and sad to leave. A boat was so much more fun than a lab that they hadn’t even minded the rain.

‘I don’t know if our research today will lead to a perfect biofuel,’ said Anika. ‘But I’ve seen corals that I never knew existed. As long as scientists keep on working together and discovering new things, we know there’s hope for the future.’

Ryan gazed at his collection of neatly labelled test tubes. ‘I’ve got enough research here for six months’ work. Maybe something will lead us to that biofuel.’

‘Or Leonora and Lance might have discovered the missing link,’ said Jack.

‘Or maybe the kids will,’ said Anika. ‘I wonder if they’ve had as good an adventure today as we have?’

The two men smiled with her. The white sails caught the wind and blew them towards the distant smudge of island.

S
ELKIE CARRIED
T
IFFANY
over the curve of the rainforest to the trail past the caves. Tiffany had to lie on the sea lion’s back, because her foot would have dragged on the ground if she’d sat up straight, but Selkie went so slowly and carefully that Tiffany never fell off.

But it was a long drop from the cliff to the cove, and Tiffany would fall off for sure if she tried to ride the sea lion down those huge steep rocks.

‘I could slide,’ said Tiffany.

‘No,’ said everyone else. They’d all seen Tiffany’s face when her foot had bumped into things on the trail.

‘Remember in
Passage to Patagonia
, when the tribe is carrying the wounded warrior through the jungle?’ said Edmund.

‘Perfect!’ said Nim.

‘I just made it up,’ said Alex. ‘I don’t know if it’ll work.’

With her pocketknife, Nim cut two lengths of thick, strong vines. They wove them through the ends of the fishing net to make handles.