Free The Last Notebook of Leonardo by B.B. Wurge Page A

morning?”
    â€œAs early as you wish,” she said, smiling at him and pointing. “It’s right there. Didn’t you realize?”
    About hundred yards from the house, a giant rubbley cliff rose up out of the trees and slanted up in the moonlight. It was just far enough from the house that if a boulder fell off the cliff it probably wouldn’t smash through the roof.
    â€œNow you know why it’s my special cave,” she said. “I’ve been looking at it all my life. Good night, Carl Martin. Good night, Jem Martin!” She turned around, hobbled to her little house, and went inside.
    Dad and I crawled into our tent. I wanted to go to sleep, but Dad lit some candles, sat down and clutched his head between his hands. “Jem! How can we sleep? That might be the cave up there! I think I saw it. A kind of a dark spot. What if we find
something that belonged to him? My god! I don’t know if I can wait. Maybe I should try it now, in the moonlight.”
    â€œDad, don’t be ridiculous!” I said. “It’s just starting to snow. Anyway, do you know what night it is?”
    â€œNo. What?”
    â€œIt’s Christmas eve. I think. Tomorrow is Christmas day.”
    â€œYou’re right! I totally forgot about it! Good thinking, Jem. Merry Christmas. I suppose I should be good and wait till morning to unwrap the present.”
    He blew out the candles and curled up in his blanket. During the night I woke up a few times, and in the faint glow of moonlight through the tent roof I could see his massive furry back rising and falling with his breathing. But he wasn’t snoring. He was probably lying awake thinking about that cave.

11
    â€œGood morning, Indians!” Noma said, knocking on the metal surface of the wagon that made up a wall of our tent. “I thought you wanted to get up early?”
    My dad and I woke up together. We had had an exhausting few days, and had overslept. Dad must have dropped off finally in the early morning. He sat up bleary and stared at his watch through the tangles of hair over his eyes. “Jem!” he groaned. “It’s ten thirty.”
    We crawled outside. Noma had made hot pancakes for us, and I sat on her front steps and ate them with maple syrup. They were delicious, but Dad couldn’t digest them, so he ate three cabbages.
    After breakfast, we walked to the barn. Noma thought that some of the old farm equipment might be useful for climbing a cliff. I didn’t see how anything in a goat barn would help us. But it turned out
that the barn had been used as a garbage dump and a storage shed, and was piled up to the ceiling in places. It was a good thing we hadn’t tried to sleep in it the night before, because we would have walked into about six rusty circular saw blades, and a roll of wire fencing, and a broken tractor engine, and an old fashion car that had been taken apart so it could fit in through the front door, and shovels and picks and saws and screwdrivers and wooden boxes of roofing nails, and lots of old furniture, and a stack of newspapers from about fifty years ago, and the dried up skeleton of a ground squirrel that had crawled in there in the distant past, and I don’t know what else was buried in that pile.
    â€œOh dear,” Noma said standing in the doorway, the sun shafting in behind her and lighting up the jumble on the concrete floor, “I had forgotten how full it was.”
    Dad rummaged around, climbing over the teetering piles of junk into a back room, and after some banging and crashing sounds, he came back out with a big wooden spool of rope. When the rope from the barn was tied onto the rope from our wagon, we had about four hundred feet of it, and that seemed like enough.
    We walked along a path through the snowy woods until we reached the cliff. The bottom part of the
cliff rose up jumbled and broken out of the forest. The slant was shallow enough that we could climb up