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    The Rats of Wolfe Island
    The Rats of Wolfe Island
    The Rats of Wolfe Island
    Ebook102 pages1 hour

    The Rats of Wolfe Island

    By Alan Horsfield and David Dickson

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    About this ebook

    It's an eerie mystery for uni student, Eddie Haite, whose casual summer holiday on a remote tropical island in Fiji, changes from an idyllic escape into a nightmare. Eddie, on a chance meeting, agrees to help a scientist, Rex King, carry out experiments on rats recovered from an old Pacific atomic testing site. As Eddie watches Rex descend into

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEJH Talent Promotion P/L
    Release dateFeb 25, 2021
    ISBN9780646909943
    The Rats of Wolfe Island
    Author

    Alan Horsfield

    Alan Horsfield has published more than one hundred books, many of them educational texts in literacy and numeracy. His works have been published around the world. Alan is a former teacher and past president of the New South Wales Children’s Book Council and is a former judge for the New South Wales Premiers Book Awards. He loves writing books for children with interesting and quirky story lines that encourage children to read and look at things differently.

    Read more from Alan Horsfield

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      Book preview

      The Rats of Wolfe Island - Alan Horsfield

      The_Rats_of_Wolfe_Island-Cover.jpg

      First published in 2002 by Lothian Press

      Copyright © Alan Horsfield 2002

      This edition published in 2016 by EJH Talent Promotion

      The right of Alan Horsfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

      Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

      Requests and enquiries should be addressed to:

      Alan Horsfield, 9 Milman Drive, Craiglie QLD 4877

      [email protected]

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

      Creator: Horsfield, Alan, author.

      Title: The rats of Wolfe Island / Alan Horsfield.

      ISBN: 9780994457967 (paperback)

      ISBN: 9780646909943 (ebook)

      Target Audience: For young adults.

      Subjects: Rats – Effect of radiation on – Fiction.

      Animal experimentation – Fiction.

      Dewey Number: A823.3

      Cover illustration by David Dickson

      Design and layout by DiZign Pty Ltd, Sydney

      Printed in Australia

      Acknowledgements

      My thanks to Dr Wolfgang Pfaeltzer and his wife Doreen, of Savasi Island, Savusavu, Fiji Islands, for allowing me to use their small island as the setting for this work of fiction.

      Thanks also to my wife Elaine for her suggestions and many proofreadings.

      My apologies to our cat, Macavity, for putting him through these fictional ordeals.

      Chapter 1

      The email was puzzling. No, it was confusing.

      I took it from the pocket of my denim jacket and re-read the terrible typing.

      It was more than just the typing. It looked as if it had been written by someone not fully coherent, or as if it had somehow been badly copied.

      To: [email protected]

      From: [email protected]

      Subject: Experement finshed

      Eddy„ hi

      Just to letting you know I have made stop to the experiments, as you suggested. It was not achieving nothing much. The subjects were not making the kind of progres I have hoped. They were not getting smarter and I was growing old and wasting our time.

      Please tyo tell you this. Don’t

      comeback.There is no need to come and visit me as I will be closing the lab down and I will sit on my verandah and watch the sut set with a nice cool drink> >

      All I can say thank god its over

      Rex king

      (king of Wolfe island.

      Not the Kingy style at all. Something was disturbingly amiss. I sighed deeply, then realised that I was standing in the middle of the road.

      I looked in each direction, not really expecting to see anything more than a deserted road under a canopy of lush green.

      The rattling bus that had transported me to this isolated part of the coast had disappeared in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes.

      I crossed the corrugated road and dropped down onto a narrow beach. Wolfe Island was just across the lagoon. This was my third trip to the island. My first visit had been filled with anticipation and excitement, but now all I felt was apprehension and caution. I hardly noticed the tall, swaying palms and the clear skies.

      I looked up and down the beach. For a moment I had the feeling that I was being watched. The feeling passed and all I felt was foolish.

      I untied the little rowboat that was half-hidden under some beach foliage, found the oars a little bit further into the scrub where I had hidden them, and prepared for my short trip across the shallow coral waters to Wolfe Island. I bailed out some old rainwater that had collected in the boat since my last trip a month or so earlier before dropping my backpack into the bow.

      Kingy’s rowboat wasn’t anywhere to be seen. That made sense. He would be on Wolfe Island.

      My mind wasn’t on the rowing. I don’t really like rowing but it was the most convenient way to cross the couple of hundred metres to the island. Wading through the shallows at low tide would have been OK except for the narrow tidal channel right in the middle, which separated Wolfe Island from the main island. I struggled to set the boat on course for the opposite beach. It was only when the boat freed itself from the gritty sand that I started to relax a little and could survey the shoreline I had just left.

      Behind the strip of vegetation was ‘the road’. The coral-based track up the coast from the main small town could hardly be called a road but it was the only way to get around the island unless you had a powerful motor boat. I could still see the narrow single-lane wooden bridge that I had just crossed before alighting from the local bus.

      The road appeared totally deserted, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had stepped out of the bushes and watched as I crossed the channel. It was uncanny how someone could suddenly appear.

      All evidence of the bus’s existence had quickly vanished. No rumbling, no black exhaust fumes, no cloud of fine dust.

      We had hardly passed another vehicle on our trip out from town. This was well away from any tourist track. And this time I wasn’t a tourist.

      This was about as remote as you could get without finding your own sandy atoll somewhere out in the ocean beyond the horizon. The ocean here looks as if it goes on forever.

      Briefly, almost enviously, I wondered what my uni friends might be doing at that moment. The first-year soccer team would be at training. That I knew for sure.

      A slight movement caught my eye just as I was about to prepare myself for the short haul to the island. Just above the high water mark but still on the sand, under the overhang of some mangroves, was an animal. At first I thought it was a small, dark dog—maybe a pup—but there were no dogs on this island. I didn’t think there were any feral cats. There were no native furry animals as far as I knew. But this was definitely a furry little creature.

      As it moved slowly back into the shadows of the overhang I realised that it was a rather large rat. And it was watching me very intently. It hadn’t ducked for cover when it realised that it had been seen but merely moved to a less conspicuous hide to watch me.

      ‘Bloody rat!’ I swore softly.

      It was disturbing, quite disturbing, knowing what I knew about Kingy’s experiments.

      I wiped my brow on my sleeve, then took the oars and started pulling. It should have been a perfect day. The sky was clear. The water was crystal clear. I could see small

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