Rescue On Nim's Island Read Online Free Page A

hated to think of any animal struggling and trapped.
    ‘You see,’ Leonora continued, ‘even though we’re studying algae now, if we find a fossil on the island, no matter how small, it could still help us on our quest.’

    W HEN THE FIRE’S embers died down, Jack and Nim headed up the trail to their house. Fred dozed on Nim’s shoulder. She hugged Selkie goodnight, so that her friend could go down to the rocks where the king of the sea lions was barking for her.
    But Selkie hadn’t let Nim out of her sight since the scientists arrived, and she wasn’t going to start now. She galumphed up the hill with them, not caring that the trail was narrow and littered with sticks and rocks.
    ‘It’s okay,’ Nim told her, ‘they’re not Troppo Tourists!’
    HRUMPH! Selkie snorted, so loudly that Alex came out to see what was wrong. Nim knew that meant Alex had finished writing for the day. When Alex was inside a story, a whole herd of sea lions couldn’t get her out of it.
    ‘Doesn’t Selkie trust your visitors?’ she asked.
    ‘Two of the kids were rude to her,’ said Nim. ‘But she was happy about seeing Edmund. She even gave him a kiss when she thought I wasn’t looking.’
    ‘But Selina Ashburn, the biologist who was supposed to bring Edmund, couldn’t come,’ Jack told Alex. ‘She and Peter Hunterstone were taken ill at the last minute, so Lance and Leonora Bijou took their place.’
    ‘It’s lucky they were the same kind of scientists,’ said Nim.
    ‘Ah,’ said Alex, with a funny sort of smile.
    ‘What does Ah mean?’ Nim asked.
    Alex laughed. ‘It means I’ve been writing so many stories I forget that there aren’t nearly as many bad guys in real life. And that sometimes amazingly lucky coincidences really do happen.’
    She started stacking a sprawl of papers covered with diagrams and notes. ‘Speaking of bad guys: I’m trying to work out how much time my Hero has to escape.’
    ‘Where does he have to escape from?’ Nim asked.
    ‘A temple. The Bad Guys have set dynamite to explode it … Did you know that it takes forty-five seconds to burn thirty centimetres of dynamite fuse?’
    Nim and Jack hadn’t known. They were used to Alex asking questions like that.
    ‘So I need to work out how fast my Hero can run, and multiply that by how far away he has to get from the explosion, and that’ll tell me how much time he needs before the temple explodes.’
    Even though she knew now that Alex Rover wasn’t the hero of the books, and that everything that happened in them was made up in Alex’s head, Nim still loved listening to the stories. She loved the way Alex talked about the characters as if they were friends, and she especially loved when she could help work things out.
    So they talked about the Hero and the Lady Hero he was saving, and the jewel that was inside the temple, and when she went to bed Nim realised she hadn’t told Alex all about the real visitors. She’d wanted to tell her about Leonora’s scorpion trapped in amber, and how Leonora was as smooth and shiny as a jewel herself.
    She went to sleep hearing the biologist’s silky voice saying that learning about fossils could save the world. Nim was going to do everything she could to help her find something perfect.
    And when she did, everyone would want to be her friend again. Even Tiffany.

Chapter 5

    I T WAS STILL dark when Nim slipped her headlamp onto her forehead and tiptoed out of the house. Fred scuttled out from his rock, and Selkie slid across the porch, whuffling and snorting hello. They never cared how early it was; if Nim was doing something, they wanted to do it with her.
    Fred especially loved it when Nim was wearing her headlamp, because he could do his two favourite things at the same time: riding on Nim’s shoulder and catching the insects that flew into the light.
    Selkie lollopped ahead. Selkie was a lot bigger than Nim, but she could move nearly as quietly, and much faster. She started down the hill as