‘Imagine if my finger had been a SHARP THORN that you’d walked into! Or a RAMPAGING BAT!!’10
‘Sam,’ said Bernard, pushing my hands away from his face. ‘You said camping would be fun. And that you would go with me if you could. Well, now you can!’
‘And I WOULD. But this isn’t about you and me, Bernard. It is bigger than us!’ That’s something Spaceman Jack always says when he’s trying to convince Captain Jane to do something.
‘What do you mean?’ Bernard asked.
I grabbed Bernard by the shoulders and shook him. I’d seen Spaceman Jack do that too. ‘THINK OF THE SHIP, BERNARD!’ I opened my eyes as wide as I could to really get my point across.
‘Sam, is this a SPACE BLASTERS thing again? You’re acting weird.’
‘I’m only trying to save you, Bernard. It’s what friends do.’
‘I think you just don’t want to go camping,’ said Bernard.
I looked at the bed and saw the cover of the book he’d been reading. It was called Mountain Man: How to Survive a Bear Encounter. I held up the book. ‘Books won’t save you from bears, Bernard.’
‘They might! I’ve learned lots of stuff in that one. Such as if you see a bear, you should either (a) try to scare it by making yourself bigger or (b) play dead.’
‘THOSE ARE TWO VERY DIFFERENT THINGS, BERNARD! I CAN’T MAKE MYSELF BIGGER AND PLAY DEAD AT THE SAME TIME. I DON’T EVEN THINK I CAN MAKE MYSELF BIGGER.’
I was pretty sure I could play dead though. The live mice we feed my pet snake Fang do it all the time.
‘Listen, Sam, my dad has gone camping loads of times. He gave me this book! And this one!’ Bernard held up another book with the title Camping: Be One With Nature. ‘And you know how big my dad is. He won’t even have to try to make himself bigger if we do see a bear.’
He had a point.
‘And I’ve done the maths,’ Bernard added.11 ‘Statistically, at least seventy-five per cent of us will survive. With you and Stanley coming, that increases our odds!’
‘But my chances of surviving would be one-hundred per cent if I didn’t go,’ I said, proud of myself for also knowing how to do maths. ‘And it isn’t just about the bears, Bernard.’ I lowered my voice. ‘It’s the dark. Anything could be out there.’
‘We’ll bring flashlights,’ said Bernard firmly. Then he looked very seriously at me. ‘And you know that there’s no getting out of it if our parents want us to go. So we might as well prepare as much as we can.’
He was right.
Our fate was sealed.
We were going camping.
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