Free Serpent Never Sleeps by Scott O’Dell Page A

Somers himself casting a line, caught more than a ton of bass, barracuda, and tuna, in addition to two giant turtles so huge that just their flesh would have been sufficient for our dinner.
    Birds were everywhere. White herons flew about us in flocks; sparrows tried to light on our shoulders. Hunters bagged snipe, doves, ducks, and moorhens. That first morning, two women collected sixty dozen bird eggs, hundreds of turkey eggs, sweet as butter, and nearly a thousand turtle eggs.
    With two giddy boys and a stout girl, I went to dig clams in a cove just beyond our camp. We tramped the water up to our knees, finding the clams with our
toes. In less than an hour we had dug five bagfuls of round ones called cockles.
    Tom, the silliest of the boys, waded into a cave where the tide ran fast and came out shouting that he had seen a green monster.
    "It's as big as a dog—a big dog—and it's got claws."
    I took my time getting to the cave, thinking that the green monster was one of his scatterbrained notions.
    "There," he said, pointing.
    The lip of the cave was low and I had to stoop to see in. The water was clean and swirling. I saw claws and a pair of eyes, shining and black as night, sticking out at the end of two long stalks.
    "It's a lobster," I said. "It's big. Leave it alone."
    But Tom crawled into the cave. He fought the lobster for most of an hour, and I pulled them out, with the help of the stout girl, in a tangled mass of arms and claws. Tom caught three more lobsters in the cave, but none nearly so large as the monster, which was five feet long and a foot wide.
    The camp feasted upon the day's gathering and smoked what was not eaten. Except for the palm hearts, we hadn't found any vegetables. But Admiral Somers had brought lettuce and onion seeds from England, which he planted, hoping they would grow.
    Water was a problem after the first week. The casks we took from the wreck ran dry. There were no streams on the island where we were camped, but
there were hundreds of small islands, a chain of them, to the east.
    Governor Gates sent out a party in longboats to make a search for water. They found none, save pools where rain had collected. Then he had six shallow wells dug, found enough water for everyday use, laid out the ship's sails to catch run-off, and set up a small dam. The Reverend Bucke prayed for rain.
    It came in a sudden burst that washed the dam away, downed the sails, and made us realize that we could not camp on the beach forever. Cedar, a fine, fragrant wood, grew on the island. Trees were cut and boards sawed, and carpenters put up a row of one-room huts roofed with palmetto. The construction went so well that Governor Gates announced he would soon set them to work building a ship that could take us all to Jamestown.
    Through these few weeks I made no further attempts to free Anthony Foxcroft. But one night after supper, listening to Emma Swinton, I heard that some of the colonists were so taken with life in Bermuda they were laying secret plans to revolt against Governor Gates. They had no wish to leave this Eden when the ship he was planning to build sailed for Jamestown.
    "One of the conspirators," she told me, "is Francis Pearepoint. He's one of the young gentlemen camped on the point out there by the
Sea Venture.
"
    "I know him. We talked on the ship once or twice."
    "They call the camp Hampton Court," she said,
"after the two-hundred-room palace of Henry the Eighth. They've found the wreck of an old Spanish galleon, I hear, and are searching around for gold. I hope they find it. I hope the conspiracy succeeds. I much prefer Bermuda to Jamestown, from what I know about it."
    The moon was full. I walked down the beach to Hampton Court. The young gentlemen were sitting beside the fire, passing a long-stemmed pipe from one to the other. In front of them was a small chest with the lid thrown back. In it were some copper pots. Francis Pearepoint rose and bowed.
    "You honor us with your presence,