Finding Family Chapter 3

Mark woke up, and started to think about how to make a glider. He was sitting outside the cave when he spotted a tree with extremely large leaves. He thought about them for a few minutes, and then excitedly ran over to John’s tent.

“Come on, John! Wake up! I know how we can make gliders,” Mark enthusiastically yelled to John.

“All right already, I’m coming.” John sleepily crawled out of his tent, and walked over to where Mark was standing. “What’s your idea?”

Mark quickly explained his idea. “We can use those giant leaves to make wings for a glider. We can use sticks to build a frame and tie the leaves onto the frame. It’ll be like the kites we used to build with Dad.”

John considered the idea. “That might work, but how will get the leaves to stay together. Won’t they just break?”

“I already though about that,” Mark responded. “We can make layers of leaves to make them strong, and use the thread I brought to sew them together. We can use duct tape to attach the leaves onto the frame. As long as we can make them big enough to support our weight, we should be able to glide around instead of walking!”

John quickly agreed to the idea, and they started gathering leaves. They had a pile almost as tall as John before Mark suggested that they get the sticks for the frame, and build the frame. They carried all the sticks they could find nearby to the cave and started to lay the sticks out into the shape of wings. John would put a stick down, and Mark would tape it to the sticks next to it. They finished the frame of a glider during the afternoon, and decided to relax for the rest of the day.

“Hey Mark!” John called. “Look what I found!”

Mark followed the sound of John’s voice to a small mountain lake. The water was crystal clear, and Mark could see some rocks that formed a small island in the center.

“We should go swimming,” John suggested.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Mark replied. “It’s getting really late, and I don’t want to have to walk back in the dark. It’s going to be really cold, too.”

“Well, I guess I can wait. Can we go swimming before we work on the glider? I want to go swimming right after breakfast,” John said.

“All right, we’ll go tomorrow. I wonder if we can swim out to the island?” Mark thought about it for a minute and then said, “We should probably bring a log to the island so we can rest on the way though. It looks pretty far.”

Mark and John started back to the camp, marking the way to the lake as they went. When they arrived at camp, they ate a dinner of hot dogs and marshmallows and crawled into their tents. They fell asleep after calling good night to each other and eating the marshmallows they had both sneaked from the bag.