Katie Tsang - Sam Wu is NOT Afraid of the Dark!

My dad put the phone back up to his ear. ‘Bill, that would be great. Thanks so much. I’m sure they’ll have a wonderful time.’

He hung up and turned to me with a huge smile.

‘ GREATnews! You and Stanley are going camping with Bernard and his dad!’

This was, in fact, NOTgreat news.

Camping would have been terribleon its own (I remembered everything Bernard had said about bears) – and now I had to go with Stanley!

The only solution was to stop this doomed camping trip before it had even started.

‘I’ll be right back!’ I called as I ran out of the door, hopped on Two-Wheel TUBS 9and pedalled off to fix this disaster.

Bernard lives over the river on the other side of town, but I biked there so fast it was like I was travelling at light speed.

I ran up his driveway and rang the doorbell five times to let Bernard and his dad know that I was there on very urgent business.

Bernard’s dad answered the door. He looked as if he had just come back from a camping trip. During which he’d wrestled and swallowed a bear.

This is actually how he always looks. Bernard’s dad is practically a giant– he has a big moustache, and wears the kinds of clothes that I imagine a lumberjack would wear. And he’s NOTeven a lumberjack!

Bernard says he’s a palaeontologist, which I think means he likes to dig up old stuff. I don’t know how that is a real job, but grown-ups are weird. Once I asked him if he’d ever dug up a dinosaur or a mummy, and instead he showed me a rock with a leaf stuck in it and said it was thousands of years old. I was NOTimpressed. A really old rockis nowhere near as cool as a dinosaur.

‘Oh hi, Sam! Did your finger get stuck to the doorbell?’ Bernard’s dad grinned. ‘I didn’t think I’d see you till tomorrow morning when we pick you up to go camping. I bet you’re excited – I know I am. It’s going to be great for you kiddos. Getting out into the great outdoors, breathing in all that fresh air, camping under the stars, exploring the wilderness. All that good stuff.’

‘Hi, Mr Wilson,’ I said, ignoring everything he’d just said. ‘Is Bernard home? It’s VERY IMPORTANT.’

‘Is everything all right?’

‘It will be,’ I said seriously.

‘Well, okay then. Come on in.’

I squeezed past Bernard’s dad, ran up the stairs to Bernard’s room and flung open his door. Bernard was reading on his bed.

‘We have got to get out of camping,’ I said breathlessly.

Ten minutes later, I’d explained to Bernard that, actually, he was right, and that camping was a terrible idea.

‘Remember the bears, Bernard? And the poison ivy? And what about wolves? It’s going to be too risky. We’ve got to stop it. We’re the only ones brave enough.’

Bernard frowned. ‘Brave enough to stop the camping trip?’

‘Exactly! Brave enough to SAVEeveryone from certain disaster. Like getting lost in the dark woods and eaten by bears. OR WORSE.’

‘Or worse?’

I lowered my voice. ‘Bernard, do you know how dark it is in the woods? VERY DARK. Darker than this.’ I covered Bernard’s eyes with my hands.

‘Ow! You poked me in the eye!’

I’d done that by accident, but it actually helped to prove my point.

‘Imagine if my finger had been a SHARP THORNthat 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 biggerif 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 survivingwould 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.