A Rucksack Full of Slate
When a scrap truck knocks Arthur Thorne's old survey chest over the lip of the High Welsh slate quarry, eleven-year-old Jesse Thorne watches his grandfather's brass transit come to rest forty feet down on a beam of rotten hemlock.
The county pump shuts off at six o'clock. After that the pit starts to fill, and no adult is coming to help. Jesse has nerve and a rope from the old derrick shed, but a descent needs a top belay, and the only hands within a mile belong to Cora Danforth, whose family is locked in a boundary feud with his.
To reach the transit before the quarry drowns it, the two of them have to trade insults for counted feet of slack and put Jesse's whole weight on a knot, an anchor, and a wall of wet slate that keeps breaking whatever it is asked to hold.
A Rucksack Full of Slate is a middle-grade survival story about nerve, knots, and the people who keep you on the wall. Below Jesse, the water keeps climbing.
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The green slate parted the way a true seam always did: a wet click, then two plates where there had been one stone.
Jesse read the cleavage for rust streak and clay knot, set the good plate on the pile at his knee, and dropped the split half onto the spoil.
He sorted slates on the old steam-winch frame, the one piece of derrick iron still standing. Rust had eaten the drum to orange lace, but the legs were set in green slate, and green slate did not care.
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