The Starlight Claim by Tim Wynne-Jones

Author:Tim Wynne-Jones [Wynne-Jones, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536210040
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

“You’ve got to be valiant,” says Dodge.

“Valiant?” says Nate.

“Yeah, like brave on steroids,” says Dodge.

“I know what valiant means,” says Nate. “I was just wondering what new hell you’re planning.”

Dodge grabs him in a head squeeze. “Oh, you know me too well, Master Crow!” Then he steps toward the edge of the cliff and points to the waves slapping far below. “This,” he says grandly.

They’d been tromping uphill through the bush to the top of the jumping cliff on the east side of Picnic Island. You could climb up the cliff face maybe twenty or thirty feet from below, but you couldn’t scale all the way, not without climbing gear. But they’d found their way in, for the first time, from the picnic spot on the other side of the island. Dodge chuckles. “Bet you don’t have the cojones to jump it.”

“You’re right. And if I did, I’d lose my cojones doing it.”

“Told you.”

“I’m not going to jump from here because I’m not suicidal,” says Nate. He stares down the cliff face, his hands on his hips. “It must be around —”

Dodge cuts him off. “We’re not measuring this in yards or feet — and don’t give me any of your metric shit, either. This is stories high, Nathaniel; I’d say six, maybe seven. Seven stories.”

Nate looks again; his own guess would be closer to five, but that’s not what scares him off. The cliff rises from the water at an angle of maybe eighty degrees. He knows the water is plenty deep, even right at the foot of the cliff, but with a slope like this . . . “Man, you’d need to jump out something like three or four yards just to clear the rock face.”

“You got it,” says Dodge. He looks mesmerized. His expression kind of scares Nate. Then his friend turns his gaze away from the water below. “So we need to make a runway,” he says.

They spend a good whack of the afternoon doing just that. Clearing bush in their bathing suits and tees, Nate in his Walmart aqua socks, Dodge in his Speedo Surfwalkers. There is a breeze out near the cliff head strong enough to keep the blackflies at bay, but as they move inland, the flies close around them, getting in their hair and eyes.

Nate knows better than to try to convince Dodge not to do it. So what you do when your best friend is about to try something drastically stupid is make sure the “runway” is clear and long. And you calculate in the back of your head the whole time just how long it will take you to make your way back down, zigzagging through the trees to the boat at the picnic place; get the Evinrude cranked up; and then speed around to the other side of the island to rescue that best friend, who will have hit the stone face of the cliff before making it to the water, maybe gotten himself a concussion and drowned in the meantime.

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