Nim's Island

by Orr, Wendy

  WENDY ORR lives on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula with her

  dog and other family. She was born in Canada and grew up with

  various pets, in various places across North America and France.

  Once, when her family sailed to a new home, the dogs wore

  life-jackets, but the guinea pigs had to stay in their cages.

  A few years after Wendy wrote Nim’s Island, a film producer in

  Hollywood took the book out of the library to read to her son – and

  the next day emailed Wendy to ask if she could make a movie of it.

  Wendy said yes! They became good friends and Wendy had the fun

  of helping write the screenplay, and learning that making a movie

  was even more complicated than writing a book.

  It was very exciting for Wendy to watch her story become real

  on the screen, and to meet the actors who were bringing her

  characters to life. When she walked through Alex Rover’s home

  she felt as if it was somewhere that she used to live! But she thought

  the best of all was getting a big sea lion kiss from Selkie.

  Wendy is the author of several award-winning books including

  Nim’s Island, Nim at Sea, Spook’s Shack, Mokie and Bik,

  and for teenagers, Peeling the Onion.

  KERRY MILLARD was born in Canada and grew up surrounded

  by all sorts of animals, including a monkey. Later she moved

  to Australia and became a vet. One day Kerry took her crazy dog

  to dog school, drew some cartoons for their newsletter,

  and accidentally began a new career as an award-winning

  cartoonist and illustrator, and author.

  Wendy Orr

  pictures by

  Kerry Millard

  This edition first published in 2008

  First published in 1999

  Copyright © Text, Wendy Orr 1999

  Copyright © Illustrations, Kerry Millard 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Orr, Wendy.

  Nim’s island / author, Wendy Orr.

  East Melbourne, Vic. : Allen and Unwin, 2008.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 473 5 (pbk.).

  A823.3

  Cover illustration: “NIM’S ISLAND”™ & © 2007 Walden Media. LLC

  All Rights Reserved

  Text illustrations by Kerry Millard

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  Set in Minion

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  With thanks to my parents, who searched their log books

  and photograph albums to help build Nim’s Island,

  and to all my family, friends and internet acquaintances

  who answered my requests for odd information on coconuts,

  whistling shells and broken rudders.

  W.O.

  IN A PALM TREE, on an island, in the middle of the wide blue sea, was a girl.

  Nim’s hair was wild, her eyes were bright, and around her neck she wore three cords. One was for a spyglass, one for a whirly, whistling shell and the other a fat, red pocket-knife in a sheath.

  With the spyglass at her eye, she watched her father’s boat. It sailed out through the reef to the deeper dark ocean, and Jack turned to wave and Nim waved back, though she knew he couldn’t see.

  Then the white sails caught the wind and blew him out of sight, and Nim was alone. For three days and three nights, whatever happened or needed doing, Nim would do it.

  ‘And what we need first,’ said Nim, ‘is breakfast!’ So she threw four ripe coconuts thump! into the sand, and climbed down after them.

  Then she whistled her shell, two long, shrill notes that carried far out to the reef where the sea lions were fishing. Selkie popped her head above the water. She had a fish in her mouth, but she swallowed it fast and dived towards the beach.

  And from a rock by the hut, Fred came scuttling. Fred was an iguana, spiky as a dragon, with a cheerful snub nose. He twined round Nim’s feet in a prickly hug.

  ‘Are you saying good morning,’ Nim demanded, ‘or just begging for breakfast?’

  Fred stared at the coconuts. He was a very honest iguana.

  Coconuts are tricky to open, but Nim was an expert. With a rock and a spike, she punched a hole and drank the juice; cracked the shell and pried out the flesh. Fred snatched his piece and gulped it down.

  Marine iguanas don’t eat coconut, but no one had ever told Fred.

  Now Selkie was flopping up the beach to greet them, but: ‘We’ll come in too!’ Nim shouted, and dived off the rocks.

  Selkie twisted and shot up underneath, gliding Nim through the waves, thumping over, ducking under. Nim clung tight, till she was half sea lion and half girl, and all of her was part ocean.

  Then Selkie and Fred went to sunbake on the rock and Nim went back to the hut. She poured a mug of water from her favourite blue bottle, brushed her teeth above a clump of grass that needed the spit, and started her chores. There were lots today, because she was doing some of Jack’s as well as her own.

  LONG AGO, when Nim was a baby, she’d had a mother as well as Jack. But one day, her mother had gone to investigate the contents of a blue whale’s stomach. It was an interesting experiment that no one had done for thousands of years, and Jack said that it would have been all right, it should have been safe—until the Troppo Tourists came to make a film of it, shouting and racing their huge pink-and-purple boat around Nim’s mother and the whale. When Jack told them to stop they made rude signs and bumped their boat against the whale’s 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.

  So Jack packed his baby into his boat and sailed round and round the world, just in case Nim’s mother came back up out of the ocean somewhere else and didn’t know where to find them. Then one day, when the baby had grown into a very little girl, he’d found this island.

  It was the most beautiful island in the whole world. It had white shell beaches, pale-gold sand and tumbled black rocks where the spray threw rainbows into the sky. It had a fiery mountain with green rainforest on the high slopes and grasslands at the bottom. There was a pool of fresh water to drink, a waterfall to slide down and, in a hidden hollow where the grasslands met the white shell beach, there was—‘A place for a hut!’

  And, around it all, so that only the smallest boats could weave their way through, was a maze of reef, curving from the black rocks on one side to the white cliffs on the other.

  Jack sailed back to a city for the very last time. He filled up the boat with plants for a garden and supplies for science, and landed on the island to build a home for just him and his daughter, because h
e knew now that Nim’s mother had stayed down at the bottom of the sea.

  Like a mermaid, Nim thought.

  He built a hut of driftwood logs and good strong branches, with a palm-thatched roof and a hard dirt floor. He put up a satellite dish, and a solar panel to charge the batteries for a torch, a mobile phone and a laptop computer.

  He made sleeping mats stuffed with rustling palm fronds, a table and two stools, a desk, bookcases and shelves for his science stuff, coconut-shell bowls and sea-shell plates. He dug a vegetable garden in the rich soil at Fire Mountain’s base and planted avocados, bananas, lettuce, oranges, pineapples, strawberries, sweet potatoes and tomatoes, and bamboo for making pipes and useful things.

  Then he went on being a scientist, and when Nim got older, she helped him. They read what the barometer said, measured how much rain fell every day and how strong the winds were, how high the high tides reached and how low the low tides fell, and then they marked the measurements on a clean white chart with a dark-blue texta.

  They studied the plants that grew on the island and the animals that lived there. They put blue bands on the birds’ legs and wrote down the numbers so Jack could remember the birds’ birthdays and who their mothers and fathers were. (Nim remembered anyway.)

  Sometimes Jack wrote articles about the weather and the plants and animals, and emailed them to science magazines and universities, and sometimes people emailed him questions to answer. He would tell them about tropical storms and iguanas and seaweed, but he would never tell them where the island was, in case the Troppo Tourists ever found it, because Jack hated the Troppo Tourists worse than sea-snakes or scorpions. Only the supply ship—which came once a year to bring them books and paper, flour and yeast, nails and cloth and the other things they couldn’t make themselves—knew where they lived. It was too big to weave its way through the reef, so Jack and Nim always sailed out to meet it, and the ship’s captain never saw just how beautiful the island was.

  And every day, no matter how excited Jack got about finding a new kind of sea-shell or butterfly, they looked after their garden; they watered it if it was dry, weeded the weeds and picked what was ripe. Jack built a three-sided shed for the tools, with a hook for the bananas and his big machete to cut them with. The machete was Nim’s favourite tool.

  When they’d looked after the garden and fished for dinner and checked the beaches for driftwood or bottles or anything else that might have floated in on the tide, Nim had school.

  That was what they called it, but it wasn’t inside and it wasn’t at a desk. They sat on the beach in the dark to study the stars, and climbed cliffs to see birds in their nests. Nim learned the language of dolphins, about the tiny crabs that float out to sea on their coconut homes, and how to watch the clouds and listen to the wind.

  Sometimes for a whole day they talked in sea lion grunts or frigate-bird squawks or plankton wiggles.

  Jack loved plankton. Nim’s favourites were the ones that shone bright in the sea at night, but Jack loved them all, because they were so little, and so important because little fish ate them and bigger fish ate the little fish and the biggest fish ate the bigger fish, and there wouldn’t have been any fish at all if it wasn’t for plankton.

  But Nim liked animals that you could see, and have fun with, so when Jack had said he was going sailing for three days to collect plankton, Nim had decided to stay home.

  ‘I’ll phone every night at sunset,’ said Jack. ‘And then you can check the email. If you don’t hear from me or see me for three days, send an SOS.’

  But Nim knew that Jack would be okay because he was the best sailor on the ocean, and Jack knew that Nim would be okay because Selkie was always with her, and Selkie sometimes forgot that Nim was strong and smart, and looked after her as if she was a tiny pup.

  Even when the king of the sea lions barked at her to come and fish or snuggle down at night with her sea lion family, Selkie stayed close to Nim.

  ALL THAT FIRST DAY alone Nim did the things that she did when Jack was home. Sometimes she even forgot that he wasn’t just somewhere else on the island, measuring the bubbles at the Hissing Stones or counting eggs in a kittywake’s nest.

  But when she went to bed, the wind began to blow.

  It had been the tiniest breeze as she sat on the beach to watch the sun go down and wait for the phone to ring; the barest stirring of the palms as Jack said hello.

  ‘Did you find interesting plankton?’ she asked.

  ‘Millions,’ said Jack. ‘Trillions. And some greedy birds who thought I was fishing.’

  ‘Far-away birds?’

  ‘Home birds. The big one you call Galileo swooped me in case my microscope was a fish. I told him to go home and bother you.’

  Nim laughed. ‘He did! I only caught one fish all afternoon—and he snitched it right out of my hand! So I gave up and read on Selkie’s Rock.’

  ‘Good book?’

  ‘Mountain Madness. You said it was your very favourite, remember?’

  ‘So I did,’ said Jack.

  ‘Because it’s exciting?’

  ‘I liked the people in it,’ said Jack. ‘I felt as if the Hero could be my friend.’

  ‘It’d be funny having a friend that could talk.’

  ‘Honk, whuffle, grunt,’ said Jack in his best sea lion voice. ‘Selkie can talk! She’s just not very good at telling stories.’

  Nim patted Selkie in case that hurt her feelings.

  ‘Don’t forget to check the email,’ Jack went on. ‘Say I’ll answer in a few days. Unless it’s the Troppo Tourists—I’d rather meet six hungry sharks than that pink-and-purple boat!’

  ‘I’d rather meet a cyclone at sea!’

  ‘I’d rather jump in the fire from Fire Mountain . . . or talk to Nim when she hasn’t had enough sleep!’ said Jack. ‘Don’t stay up too late reading!’

  So Nim blew iguana kisses into the phone, and went back to the hut, and the breeze flicked her hair and was cool against her cheek.

  It was already dark in the hut, and when she checked the email, even though she didn’t know anyone in the wide, wide world who might send her a letter, it made her lonely to see ‘No Messages’ in the email box on the screen.

  ‘Goodnight, Selkie!’ Nim called. ‘Goodnight, Fred!’

  Fred was already asleep in his little rock cave beside the hut, but there was a quiet honk from Selkie’s Rock.

  Nim lay down on her mat with her torch and her book.

  The waves rumbled onto the reef and mumbled across the sand. The breeze whistled through the cracks in the walls, and there was no comforting noise of Jack humming to himself or turning pages.

  Nim felt excited and brave and a tiny bit afraid, but the second chapter of Mountain Madness was even more exciting than the first, and she thought about the Hero till she went to sleep.

  The wind grew stronger. It howled at the door and screamed through the windows; it laughed at Nim because Jack wasn’t there, and she didn’t know if it was just teasing her or was going to grow to a tree-throwing, hut-smashing storm.

  She switched on the torch and crept outside.

  The clouds were scudding across the moon; the stars had disappeared and there was a lashing of rain. Nim stumbled and nearly dropped her torch, but she could see Selkie’s shape, darker than the night, and heard her bark, deeper than the wind.

  Selkie nuzzled Nim’s shoulder and curled tight around her. The wind passed, the tail of a storm roaring out to sea, and Nim was snug in her sea lion shelter, breathing the warm smell of fur.

  Next morning, coconuts were scattered over the beach and the hut had a dent in the roof, but the solar panel was safe and the satellite dish, sitting above the hut like a fat white coconut, was still waiting for messages to bounce across the world and into Jack’s email.

  Inside, the hut was gritty with sand. Mountain Madness had blown open, and a piece of newspaper Jack had used as a bookmark was stuck against a wall. Nim tucked it back inside the cover, and started cleaning th
e hut.

  She shook her sleeping mat outside the door, swept out the sand, and used a scrap of old T-shirt to dust the laptop and Jack’s science stuff, her polished driftwood, a threaded wreath of shells and the picture of her mother.

  Her mother had bright, clever eyes and a wide, funny smile; she looked happy-excited because it was the morning she went diving to investigate the contents of the blue whale’s stomach.

  Nim put the photo back on the shelf.

  She put her empty water bottles into her wagon and whistled for Fred—Fred liked going wherever Nim went, especially places where Selkie couldn’t follow. He curled spikily around her neck and they towed the wagon across the grassland, up to the tangled vines and ferns of rainforest.

  At the edge of the rainforest was a wide rock pool with a waterfall tumbling into it, and on the other side of the pool was the garden.

  There were plants to prop up that had toppled over in the wind, weeds to pull and strawberries to nibble, and a huge bunch of bananas just green enough to pick.

  Nim liked bananas, but what she liked even better was swinging Jack’s machete. It was shiny and sharp and made her feel like a pirate.

  ‘Aargh, me hearties!’ she shouted, and chopped down the bunch.

  She dragged them to the shed and hooked them to a rope looping over a beam in the roof.

  ‘I’m swinging the bananas!’ And she grabbed the rope just above her head. Fred jumped and clung to the end with his claws. Swinging hard and heavy, they hoisted the bananas up to the roof to ripen.

  It would have been easier if Selkie had helped, but sea lions aren’t much good at swinging on ropes.

  Nim put the machete away. ‘Are you hot?’

  Fred knew what she was thinking. He raced her up the path to the top of the waterfall.

  Over thousands of years, the water trickling down the mountain had worn away the steep black rocks to make a curving slide. It was perfect for whooshing a girl and an iguana over bumps and dips and splashing them into the pool at the bottom.