Wendy Orr - Nims Island

Contents

With thanks to my parents, who searched their logbooks
and photograph albums to help build Nims 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.

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1

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

Nims hair was wild, her eyes were bright, and around her neck she wore three cords. One was for a spyglass, one for a whorly, whistling shell, and one for a fat red pocketknife in a sheath.

With the spyglass at her eye, she watched her fathers 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 couldnt 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 toward 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 Nims 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 dont eat coconut, but no one had ever told Fred.

Now Selkie was flopping up the beach to greet them. Well 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 favorite 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 Jacks as well as her own.

LONG AGO, when Nim was a baby, shed had a mother as well as Jack. But one day, her mother had gone to investigate the contents of a blue whales 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 safeuntil the Troppo Tourists came to make a film of it, shouting and racing their huge pink-and-purple boat around Nims mother and the whale. When Jack told them to stop, they made rude signs and bumped their boat against the whales nose.

The whale panicked and dived, so deep that no one ever knew where or when he came back up again.

Nims 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 Nims mother came back up out of the ocean somewhere else and didnt know where to find them. Then one day, when the baby had grown into a very little girl, hed 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 rain forest on the high slopes and grasslands at the bottom. There was a pool of fresh water to drink and a waterfall to slide down, and, in a hidden hollow where the grasslands met the white shell beach, there wasA 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 he landed on the island to build a home for just him and his daughter, because he knew now that Nims 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 flashlight, a cell 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 seashell plates. He dug a vegetable garden in the rich soil at Fire Mountains 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 marker.

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 e-mailed them to science magazines and universities, and sometimes people e-mailed 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 shipwhich came once a year to bring them books and paper, flour and yeast, nails and cloth, and the other things they couldnt make themselvesknew 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 ships captain never saw just how beautiful the island was.