Leaving Protection by Will Hobbs

Author:Will Hobbs [Hobbs, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ages 8 & Up
ISBN: 9780061963704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-10-11T07:00:00+00:00

12

THE BEACH GRAVEL WAS strewn with bull kelp, beached jellyfish, and broken shells of crabs and razor clams. The strip between the high tide line and the jumble of driftwood logs left by monster storms was littered with the usual pieces of Styrofoam. My eye went to a half-buried salmon flasher and a headless Barbie. Without even thinking about it—beachcombing was a lifetime habit—I kept scanning for man-made objects as I crawled over the logs to look for a way into the trees. You never knew what you might find.

A small bit of rounded green glass caught my eye. It was showing above the coarse gravel between two giant logs. I’d forgotten all about what my sister had told me at the last—to keep my eye out for a glass ball for her, and that’s what this was. I fell to my knees and started digging with my hands. “What’s going on?” Torsen yelled from the beach. I had dropped from sight, and he sounded suspicious.

“Nothing,” I yelled back. “I found something.” I kept digging like a bear starving for clams. Japanese fishermen used to use these virtually unbreakable glass balls as floats on their fishing nets. Every two or three years my family would come across one the size of a grapefruit. I’d seen one the size of a volleyball once, but today I couldn’t believe my luck. The one I was holding in my hands was bigger than a basketball. This was the beachcombing trophy of a lifetime.

I heard Tor clambering over the logs, and now he stood high above me with his rifle. I held up the big green float; it didn’t make him smile. “For my sister,” I said, as his eyes appraised my prize.

“I’ll consider it,” he said. “I thought you were working for me. You have no idea how much I could get for that ball.”

“I don’t even want to know.”

“Cutting you in for your fifteen percent, that would be fair enough, don’t you think?”

“I don’t care how much you could sell it for,” I said stubbornly. “It’s mine, for my sister, Maddie. Finders keepers—like your plaques, Tor.”

He laughed. The way he laughed, the way he was holding the rifle, and the way he had me so far below him, between the gigantic logs: it flashed through my mind that this exact spot could be my grave.

“Leave it be for now,” Torsen ordered. The rain, gusting off the cove, was dripping through his tree-moss beard. “We’re burning daylight. I thought you had a job to do.”

For now I just wanted off, off of Torsen’s boat and out of his life. I wanted my old life back.

As I walked the high side of the drift logs looking for a way through the devil’s club, I told myself that my sister would have the glass float in the end.

There’s no part of devil’s club that doesn’t hurt. Six, eight, ten feet high, their stalks bristle with thorns. Even their foot-wide leaves are armored with stickers. I began to see a way through the jungle if I angled this way, then that.

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