A Talent for Trouble by Natasha Farrant

Author:Natasha Farrant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

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Alice did not think, as you might, that what Barney was asking was strange. This was, after all, the man who had once woken her in a blizzard in the middle of the night to make snow angels in the garden. And who one bright sunny day had turned up at school and faked a hospital appointment for her just so that they could drive to the beach. And who one year had organized an Easter egg hunt in the countryside around Cherry Grange so vast and so complicated that they were out climbing trees and scrabbling under hedges long after sunset, looking for chocolate.

Barney Mistlethwaite was quite the one for extravagant gestures.

The first thing was to work out what on earth he meant. Alice stared at the picture. There was an island, and there were birds . . . She closed her eyes and tried to think: Barney on her bed for a good-night cuddle . . . the mock sword fight with his phone . . .

Pow! Zap! Take that, vile intruder! What else had he written?

The Isle of . . . something . . . is a paradise for ornithologists and seabirds . . .

Yes—but the Isle of what?

She left the infirmary as soon as Matron let her and, without even bothering to change, went straight to the library. The rain had cleared up completely now, and the sky was a soft pale gray, almost white, with the loch a still sheet of silver. Most of the lower years were outside. The only people in the library were older students with exams coming up, who barely looked up as she passed. The air smelled of ink and paper and beeswax, and there were books from floor to ceiling. Usually, she found it impossible not to take one out to read. Today, however, she was on a different mission.

She found a free computer and typed in her search:

Scottish islands.

The first result informed her unhelpfully that there were more than 790 islands off the coasts of Scotland.

Scottish paradise for birds returned an avalanche of information about tropical plants.

Scottish seabirds . . . That was better! There was the arctic skua . . . the guillemot . . . the gannet . . . None of these rang any bells. The arctic tern . . . the great skua . . . the puffin!

Barney had definitely mentioned puffins.

Where are the Scottish puffins? she typed, and snorted with laughter at the comical picture of a small black and white bird with a huge striped beak, its head tilted curiously to the side. She stopped laughing when she realized that the puffins were everywhere, in far-flung places she had never heard of: Shetland, Noss, Muckle Flugga, Hermaness, Nish . . .

Nish! That was it! She was almost certain. She clicked to find out more.

The Isle of Nish is the largest of an archipelago of small islands and skerries lying west of Lumm, in Scotland, and part of the Inner Hebrides .

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