Thud, thud, thud. Old Roger was banging a stick on our group log to get us up and out of our shelters.
'Wake up, you lazy newhairs. If you don't hurry up, the dip will be over before we even get there, and all the bucks will have gone back up Dark!'
Hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, went the trees all around us, pumping and pumping hot sap from under ground. Hmmmmmmm, went forest. And from over Peckhamway came the sound of axes from Batwing group. They were starting their wakings a couple of hours ahead of us, and they were already busy cutting down a tree.
'What?' grumbled my cousin Gerry, who slept in the same shelter as me. 'I've only just got to sleep!'
His little brother Jeff propped himself up on one elbow. He didn't say anything, but watched with his big interested eyes as Gerry and I threw off our sleep skins, tied on our waistwraps, and grabbed our shoulder wraps and our spears.
'Get your arses out here, you lazy lot!' came David's angry spluttery voice. 'Get your arses out fast fast before I come in and get you.'
Gerry and me crawled out of our shelter. Sky was glass-black, Starry Swirl was above us, clear as a whitelantern in front of your face, and the air was cool cool as it is in a dip when there's no cloud between us and stars. Most of the grownups in the hunting party were gathered together already with spears and arrows and bows: David, Met, Old Roger, Lucy Lu ... A bitter smell was wafting all around our clearing, and the smoke was lit up by the fire and the shining lanterntrees. Our group leader Bella and Gerry's mum, my kind ugly aunt Sue, were roasting bats for breakfast. They weren't coming with us, but they'd got up early to make sure we had everything we needed.
'Here you are, my dears,' said Sue, giving me and Gerry half a bat each: one wing, one leg, one tiny little wizened hand.
Ugh! Bat! Gerry and me pulled faces as we chewed the gristly meat. It was bitter bitter, even though Sue had sweetened it with toasted stumpcandy. But that was what the hunting party was all about. We were having bat for breakfast because our group hadn't managed to find better meat in forest round Family, so now we were going to try our luck further away, over in Peckham Hills, where woollybucks came down during dips from up on Snowy Dark.
'We won't walk up Cold Path to meet them,' said Roger, 'we'll go up round the side of it, up Monkey Path, and then meet Cold Path at the top of the trees.'
Whack! David hit me across the bum with the butt of his big heavy spear and laughed.
'Wakey, wakey, Johnny boy!'
I looked into his ugly batface – it was one of the worst batfaces in Family: it looked like he had a whole extra jagged mouth where his nose should be – but I couldn't think of anything to say. There was no fun in the man. He'd hit you hard for no reason, and then laugh like he'd made a joke.
But just then a bunch of Spiketree newhairs arrived in our clearing with their spears and bows, walking along the trampled path that linked our group to theirs on its way to Greatpool.
'Hey there, Redlanterns!' they called out. 'Aren't you ready yet?'
Bella had agreed with their group leader Liz that some of them could come along with us and take a share of the kill. They were the group next to us Redlanterns in Family and, for the present, they were keeping the same wakings and sleepings as us, which made it easy for us to do things together with them (easier than with, say, London group, who were having their dinner when we were just waking up).
I noticed Tina was among them: Tina Spiketree, who cut her hair with an oyster shell to make it stick up in little spikes.
'Everyone ready then?' Bella called. 'Everyone got spears? Everyone got a warm shoulder wrap? Good. Off you go then. Go and get us some bucks, and leave us in peace to get on with things back here.'
We went out by a path that led through a big clump of flickering starflowers and then into Batwing. A whole bunch of Batwing grownups and newhairs were in their clearing banging away at a giant redlantern tree with their blackglass axes, working in the pink light of its flowers. We walked round the edge of their clearing to Family Fence, dragged away the branches at the opening, and went out into open forest. No more shelters and campfires ahead of us now: nothing but shining trees.
Hmmmph, hmmmph, hmmmph, went the trees. Hmmmmmm, went forest.
We walked for a waking under the light of the treelanterns, slashing down whatever birds and bats and fruit we could get as we went along, and finally stopped to rest at the big lump of rock called Lava Blob. Old Roger handed us out a gritty little seedcake each, made of ground-up starflower seeds, so we could have something in our bellies, and then we settled down with our backs against the rock, so we didn't have to worry about leopards sneaking up behind us. There were lots of yellowlantern trees round there, which we didn't get so much back in Family, and also yellow animals called hoppers that came bouncing out of forest on their back legs and wrung their four hands together while they looked at us with their big flat eyes and went Peep peep peep. But hoppers were no good to eat and their skins were no use either, so we just chucked stones at them to make them go away and let us sleep in peace.
When we woke up, Starry Swirl was still bright bright in sky. We ate a bit of dry cake and off we went again, under redlanterns and whitelanterns and spiketrees, with flutterbyes darting and glittering all round us and bats chasing the flutterbyes and trees going hmmph, hmmph, hmmph like always, until it all blurred together into that hmmmmmmmmm that was the background of our lives.
After a few miles we came to a small pool full of shiny wavyweed and all us newhairs took off our wraps and dived into the warm water for crabfish and oysters to eat. All the boys watched Tina Spiketree diving in, and they all thought how graceful she was with her long legs, and how smooth her skin was, and how much they wanted to slip with her. But when she came up she swam straight to me, and gave me a dying oyster with the bright pink light still shining out of it.
'You know what they say about oysters, don't you, John?' she said.
Tom's neck, she was pretty pretty, the prettiest in whole of Family. And she knew it well well.
In another couple of hours we reached the place where Peckham Hills began to rise up out of forest of Circle Valley, and started to climb up through them by Monkey Path, which isn't really a path, but just a way we know through the trees. The trees carried on up the slopes – redlanterns and whitelanterns and scalding hot spiketrees – and there were flickering starflowers growing beneath them, just like in the rest of forest. Streams ran through them down from darkness and ice, heading towards Greatpool, still cold cold but already bright and glittering with life. And small creatures called monkeys jumped from tree to tree. They had little thin bodies, and six long arms with a hand on the end of each. Handsome Fox shot one with an arrow, and was pleased pleased with himself, even though they were all bones and sinews and only give a mouthful of meat, because they move fast and are hard to aim at with those big blotches on their skin that flash on and off as they swing among the lanternflowers.
As we climbed up it got colder. The starflowers disappeared, the trees became smaller, and there weren't any monkeys any more, only the occasional smallbuck darting away through the trees. And then the trees stopped and we came out from the top edge of forest onto bare ground. Pretty soon, when we'd climbed above the height of those last few little trees, we could see whole of Circle Valley spread out below us – whole of Eden that we knew, with thousands and thousands of lanterns shining all the way from where we stood on Peckham Hills to Dark shadow of Blue Mountains away in the distance, and from Rockies over the left, with the red glow of Mount Snellins smouldering in middle, to the deep darkness over to our right that was Alps. And above all of it the huge spiral of Starry Swirl was still shining down.
Of course, with no trees to give off light with their lanternflowers or to warm the air with their trunks, it was dark dark up there – you could only just barely make things out in the starlight and the light from the edge of forest – and it was cold cold, specially on our feet. But us newhairs dared each other to run up as far as the snow. The ice felt like it was burning, it was so cold, and most kids took ten twenty steps, yelled and came running down again. But I took Gerry right up to the ridge of the hill and then, ignoring Old Roger yelling at us to come back, went far enough down the other side so that the others couldn't see us.
'We've made our point now, haven't we, John?' Gerry said, shivering. We only had waistwraps on, and buckskins round our shoulders, and our feet were hurting like they'd been skinned. 'Shall we go back down to rest of them now?'
My cousin Gerry was about a wombtime younger than me – his dad was giving his mum a slip, in other words, about the time that I was born – and he was devoted to me, he thought I was wonderful, he'd do just about anything I asked.
'No, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Be quiet and listen.'
'Listen to what?'
'To the silence, you idiot.'
There was no hmmmmmmmm of forest, no hmmph, hmmph, hmmph of pumping trees, no starbirds going hoom, hoom, hoom in the distance, no flutterbyes flapping and flicking, no whoosh of diving bats. There was no sound at all except a quiet little tinkle of water all around us coming out from under the snow in hundreds of little streams. And it was dark dark. No tree-light up there. The only light came from Starry Swirl.
We could barely make out each other's faces. It made me think about that place called Earth where Tommy and Angela first came from, way back in the beginning with the Three Companions, and where one waking we would all return, if only we stayed in the right place and were good good good. There were no lanterntrees back there on Earth, no glittery flutterbyes or shiny flowers, but they had a big big light that we don't have at all. It came from a giant star. And it was so bright that it would burn out your eyes if you stared at it.
'When people talk about Earth,' I said to Gerry, 'they always talk about that huge bright star, don't they, and all the lovely light it must have given? But Earth turned round and round, didn't it, and half the time it wasn't facing the star at all but was dark dark, without lanterns or anything, only the light the Earth people made for themselves.'
'What are you talking about, John?' Gerry said, with his teeth chattering. 'And why can't we go back down again if you just want to talk?'
'I was thinking about that darkness. They called it Night, didn't they? I'm just thinking that it must have been like this. What you get up here on Snowy Dark: it's what they would have called Night.'
'Hey John!' Old Roger was calling from the far side of the ridge. 'Hey Gerry!' He was scared we'd freeze to death or get lost or something up there.
'Better go back,' Gerry said.
'Let him stew a minute first.'
'But I'm freezing freezing, John.'
'Just one minute.'
'Okay, one minute,' said Gerry, 'but that's it.'
He actually counted it out on his pulse, one to sixty, the silly boy, and then he jumped up and we both climbed back over the ridge. Gerry went running straight down to the others, but I stood up there for a moment, partly to show I was my own man and didn't go scurrying back for Old Roger or anyone, and partly to take in how things looked from up there on top of the ridge: the shining forest, with darkness all around it, and above everything the bright bright stars. That's our home down there, I thought, that's our whole world. It felt weird to be looking in on it from outside. And though in one way the bright forest stretching away down there seemed big big, in another way it seemed small small, that little shining place with the stars above it and darkness looking down on it from the mountains all around.
Back with the others, Gerry made a big thing about his freezing feet, asking some people to feel them and rub them, begging others to let him ride on their backs until he had warmed up, and generally hopping and skipping around like an idiot. That was how Gerry dealt with people. 'I'm just a fool, I won't hurt anyone,' that was his message. But I wasn't like that. 'I'm not a fool by any means,' was my message, 'and don't assume I won't hurt you either.' I acted as if I didn't feel the cold in my feet at all, and pretty soon they were so numb anyway that I really didn't. I noticed Tina watching me and smiling, and I smiled back.
On we went, just below the snow and along the top edge of forest, where there was a bit of light from the trees, Old Roger grumbling and moaning about how newhairs had no respect any more and things were different from how they used to be.
'Old fool was scared he'd have to go back to Family and tell your mums he'd lost you,' said Tina. 'He was thinking of the trouble he'd be in. No more slippy for Old Roger.'
'Like he gets it anyway,' said dark-eyed Fox, who my mum had told me once with a shrug was like as not my father. (But then another time she said it could have been Old Roger – he wasn't quite such a fool once apparently – or maybe a pretty little newhair boy from London she once slipped with. I wished I knew, but lots of people didn't know for sure who their dad was.)
We came to Cold Path, which ran down beside a stream that carried meltwater from a big snowslug. Woollybucks made this path, and we crept up to it in case there were some on it now. There weren't, but there were lots of fresh buck tracks coming down off the snow and onto the muddy ground beside the stream as it headed down to forest below. The bucks had come down already. The dip had brought them down from wherever it was up there they normally lived, and from whatever it was that they normally did up there.
'I saw a big big bunch of them in this exact spot once,' said Roger. 'Coming down the path from the snowslug there. About ten fifteen wombs ago. There were ten twelve of them, plodding down in single file from up on Snowy Dark there and ...'
I stopped listening then. I looked up into the blackness of Snowy Dark as he talked, and wondered. No one knew anything about that place up there except that it was high high and dark dark and cold cold cold, and that it was the source of all the streams and the great snowslugs ('glay seers', as Oldest called them), and that it surrounded our whole world.
But then I noticed a light high up there in sky: a little far-off patch of pale white light hovering up there in darkness.
'Hey look! Up there!'
Normally when you see something that you don't know what it is, it only takes a second or two before you do know, or at least can have a good guess. But this I couldn't make out at all. I really had no idea what it could possibly be. I mean, there's one source of light in sky: Starry Swirl. And there's another source on the ground: living things, trees and plants and animals, plus the fires we make ourselves. But the only light I'd ever seen in between these two sources was from volcanoes like Mount Snellins, and they were red red like fire, not pale and white.
It sounds dumb but all I could think of for a moment was that it was a Landing Veekle, one of those sky-boats with lights on them that brought Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions down to Eden from the starship Defiant.
Well, we were always taught that it would happen sometime. The Three Companions had gone back to Earth for help. Something must have gone wrong, we knew, or the Earth people would have come long ago, but they had a thing with them called a Rayed Yo that could shout across sky, and another thing called a Computer that could remember things for itself. A waking would come when they'd find Defiant, or hear the Rayed Yo, and build a new starship and come for us, across Starry Swirl, through Hole-in-Sky, to take us back to the bright light of that giant giant star.
And for one sweet scary moment I thought it was finally happening now.
Then Roger spoke.
'Yeah,' he said. 'That's them. That's woollybucks alright.'
Woollybucks?
Well, of course that's all it was! It was obvious now. That pale light wasn't really in sky at all, it was up in the mountains, up on Snowy Dark, and it was just woollybucks. Michael's names, I was glad I hadn't said anything out loud. Woollybucks were the one thing we were supposed to be looking for, and I'd mistaken them for sky people from bloody Earth!
I felt a fool, but beyond that I felt sad sad, because for a few seconds I'd really thought that the time had finally come when we would find our way back to that place full of light and people, where they knew the answers to all the hard hard questions we had no idea how to solve, and could see things we can't see any more than blind people ...
But no, of course not. Nothing had changed. All we still had was Eden and each other, five hundred of us in whole world, huddled up with our blackglass spears and our log boats and our bark shelters.
It was disappointing. It was sad sad. But it was still amazing just to think the mountains up there were so high. I mean, you could see their shadows against the stars from back in Family, and you could see they must be big big, but you couldn't see the mountains themselves, only the lower slopes where there were still trees and light, and you couldn't really tell which were the mountains and which were the clouds above them. I'd only ever been to the lower hills before and I'd imagined that Snowy Dark behind them was maybe two three times higher than that ridge of hills that Gerry and I had run up to the top of. But I could tell now that it was ten twelve times that high.
And right up there – so high up, so far away, in a place so different from where we were now that it was more like looking into a dream than at a real place in the world – a row of woollybucks were moving in single file across the slope, and the soft white lanterns on the tops of their heads were lighting up the snow around them. Just for a moment as the bucks went past, the snow shone white, and then it became grey, and then it went back into blackness again. And though woollybucks are big beasts, two three times the weight of a man, they looked so tiny and alone up there in their tiny little pool of light that they might as well have been little ants. They might as well have been those little flylets that live behind the ears of bats.
And in the back of my mind a little thought came to me that there were other worlds we could reach that weren't hidden away in Starry Swirl, or through Hole-in-Sky, but here on ground, in Eden. They were the places where the woollybucks went, the places they came from.
'There were about twelve thirteen bucks that time I was telling you about,' Old Roger said. 'They came down here and we did for four of them before the rest ran away back up the hill where we couldn't follow. You know old Jeffo London, the bloke with one leg that makes the boats? Well, he had two legs back then and he got a bit overexcited and went after the other seven eight bucks. He got lost up there in Dark. We waited as long as we could, but pretty soon we were freezing too, so we went down the path a bit and waited there for him. No one thought he'd make it back but, just before we were about to head back to Family with the bucks, he bloody did! He came stumbling down the path with these kind of white burns on his toes and his leg. It turned to black after a while – a black burn, though they call it gang green for some reason – and that's why he's only got one leg. We had to cut off the other one, saw it off with a blackglass knife. Harry's dick! You should have heard him yell. But the rest of us, well, we were pretty happy to be going back with all that buckmeat. And we were popular when we got back, I can tell you. We were happy. Slippy all round, I reckon. I know I ...'
'Yeah alright, Roger,' David interrupted. He didn't like it when people laughed and joked about having a slip. 'Alright Roger, that's interesting I'm sure, but that lot's not coming down, are they?'
Old Roger peered up at Snowy Dark and pretended to look. He was at that age when folk start going blind: eighty wombtimes old or thereabouts. He didn't want us to know how bad it had got in case we decided he shouldn't be the head huntsman for our group any more – which he really shouldn't have been – so no way was he going to let on that all he could really see was a blur. 'No, I suppose,' he said, 'it's ... um ... always hard to tell with woollybucks.'
This is nuts, I thought, letting this old man lead us. Food was getting scarcer in our group and Family in general. Not really scarce, but we all went a bit hungry some wakings. And yet who did we send out to lead a woollybuck hunt for our group? This blind old fool!
'They're headed away from us,' David said coldly. 'So we'd better get down again and try and get the ones that came down earlier.'
'How do you know that lot up there aren't the same ones that came down?' asked Met. He was a big tall boy who wasn't all that bright, and didn't often speak. 'Maybe they've been down already and now they're going up again?'
'Look at the tracks, Met,' said David, poking Met hard in the arm. 'Look at the bloody tracks. They're all going downhill, aren't they? There's none coming up. Look at the way the toes are pointed, Einstein. So that means a bunch of them are still down there, doesn't it? And I'd say they'll stay down there too while Starry Swirl is still out.'
'Couldn't we wait here until they come back up again?' asked Met.
It was a stupid suggestion. All the wraps we had to cover ourselves with were our bitswraps round the middle and a buckskin round the shoulders, and our feet were bare and cold.
'Oh clever,' said David, and he looked at Met with his smile that wasn't really a smile, wind whistling in and out of his ugly hole of a face, with that other bit of mouth that went up where a nose should be and always seemed red and sore. 'Stay up by all means, Met, but I don't think I fancy a dose of gang green myself.'
He was always a sarcastic bastard. But that, and hitting people, was about the nearest he got to being friendly.
'Anyone want to freeze up here with Met, go ahead,' David said. 'Otherwise let's get down out of the cold to where the woollybucks actually are, eh?'
It was cold cold. Even if you put your back against a tree trunk it was cold, because they were only stumpy little trees up there and they didn't give out heat like a big redlantern or whitelantern does down in the valley. But then again, I thought to myself, Met's idea wasn't so dumb. If we could only find a way of staying up there for a bit longer we could spear loads loads more bucks, because they always did come up and down these paths down from Dark around dips. So why didn't we think about ways of keeping warm up there? Why didn't we bring some more wraps with us, or make wraps that we could tie up round us? Why hadn't we found a way of putting wraps round our feet? Why had we decided that it was too bloody cold and difficult up by Dark to even try and work out a way round it?
But that was how it was. We walked down beside the stream again and pretty soon tall trees were all around us again, there were lanterns wherever we looked, white and red and blue, and that little crack in the hills had widened out into Cold Path Valley. It was a small place: in an hour you could walk right across it to the narrow little gap in the hills that led back into Circle Valley where we lived.
'I wonder where the woollybucks go,' I said. 'I wonder if there's another forest they go to beyond the hills.'
'Another forest?' snorted Fox. 'Don't be daft, John. There couldn't be anywhere else as big as Circle Valley.'
'That's wrong! When Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions first saw Eden, they saw lights all over ...'
'Beyond the hills the Shadow People live,' Lucy Lu interrupted me in a loud slow dreamy voice.
She was a woman with a round pale face and watery eyes who used to go round the other groups in Family and offer to talk to the shadows of their dead in exchange for bits of blackglass and old skins and scraps of food.
'That's crap,' said Tina. 'There's no such thing as Shadow People.'
I agreed with her. I'd got no time for things that people saw out of the corner of their eye, or in dreams. Harry's dick, there were enough real things to look at face on! There were enough things you could put your hands on and hold.
'You wouldn't say that if you saw them like I do,' said Lucy Lu in that dreamy voice, like she was only half in our world and half in a shadow world which only she could see.
'Some people reckon sky is a huge flat stone,' Gerry broke in suddenly, 'and Starry Swirl is rocklanterns growing underneath it, like you get in caves. This big flat stone, it sits up there with its edges on the top of Snowy Dark. Dark is really there to hold it up.'
'That is really crap,' said Tina with her throaty laugh. 'Boy, that really is. And no one else even says it either apart from you, Gerry. You made it up just now. Trying to be different like your hero John.'
'No I didn't!' Gerry laughed.
He was happy to have headed off an argument between me and Lucy Lu and Fox.
'Of course you did,' Tina told him. 'It's the most half-arsed thing I ever heard.'
'Yes, and make sure you don't say that sort of thing in front of Oldest either,' said Old Roger. 'They wouldn't like it. How could Tommy and Gela have come down from Starry Swirl with the Three Companions if it was just rocklanterns on a stone?'
'So Gerry can't have his own ideas?' I said. 'But Oldest can make up any fairy story they like and then force us all to accept that it's true?'
'You watch it, John,' said David. 'You bloody watch what you say.'
'Newhairs!' complained Old Roger. 'When I was young we showed respect to our Oldest. We'd never say the True Story was made-up.'
I didn't really think it was made up. I didn't doubt that Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions had come down from sky. We had the Mementoes after all, we had the Earth Models, we had old writing and pictures scratched on trees. We had all kinds of reasons for believing it was true. I just didn't like the way that some people were allowed to take that old story and keep it for themselves and make it say what they wanted it to say.
Pretty soon Old Roger divided us up into pairs and had us spread out across Cold Path Valley, looking for woollybucks. I was in a pair with Gerry. We were sent to the narrow gap called Neck, which went through into Circle Valley proper.
'Right up to Neck, mind,' Old Roger said, 'but not beyond. That way you should spot any bucks that try and run that way from the rest of us.'
We walked over to Neck, and squatted down with our spears to wait for bucks. There was a place above us that I'd visited once twice on the spur of hill that formed the right hand side of Neck as you looked back towards Family, and I pointed it out to Gerry.
'There are five six good dry caves up there,' I told him, 'with a bit of open ground in front of them so you could sit there and look out over forest. And a bit below them there's a pool, ten twelve foot across, warm warm from spiketree roots.'
Gerry glanced up where I was pointing and shrugged.
'It would be a good place for Family to live,' I told him. 'Much better than where we live now. It's got everything you need: a pool, caves. It's handy for woollybucks. Blackglass too, I dare say, if you looked hard enough.'
Gerry laughed.
'You say weird weird things sometimes, John. What do you mean a good place for Family? Family is a place!'
'It's a place, and it's a bunch of people,' I said. 'The people could move, couldn't they? Or some of them. The people and the place don't have to be the same thing. Family could move and this would be just the place to move to.'
'But we've got to stay by Circle!' Gerry protested. 'Otherwise Earth won't be able to find us when they come back for us! Come on, John, you ...'
Then he broke off, and laughed like he'd realized I was joking, but I'd fooled him just for a moment.
I wasn't sure myself if it was a joke or not.
'Let's go out into the big forest,' I said.
Gerry shrugged. He'd do whatever I wanted. He was one of those that need other people to tell him what to do and what to be.
'We were supposed to stay in Cold Path Valley,' he pointed out.
'Yes, but we'll just go a little way.'
It was pretty soon after we went through Neck and into Circle Valley forest that we met the leopard.
We were in one of those openings you get in whitelantern forest, where an old group of trees has died and crumbled and no new ones have come up yet from Underworld. All around us were whitelanterns and spiketrees with flowers shining white and blue, with flutterbyes feeding on the lanterns, and starflowers growing beneath the trees. But right here, in this open space, there were only little tiny starflowers growing close to the ground, and Starry Swirl was plain to see high above us, with no branches and lanterns in the way.
I was just kneeling down to get a drink from a stream when I saw it.
'Look Gerry, there!' I whispered, scrambling back up to my feet.
'What?'
A group of starflowers among the trees shone out for a moment and then faded again. And then the same thing happened among another lot of trees over to the left of the first lot, flowers appearing and fading. And then the same again, a bit further on.
'Gela's tits!' Gerry says. 'Quick! Get up a tree!'
I didn't move. Another lot of flowers appeared and disappeared. Meanwhile Starry Swirl shone down and flutterbyes fluttered and sparkled, and the trees went hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, and forest went hmmmmmmm, like always.
More flowers lit up and disappeared, and this time we could see the dark shadow of the leopard itself, almost invisible behind those shiny, shimmery starflowers on its skin that slide back towards its tail as it goes forward, so they seem to stay in one place. It was circling round us, like leopards do, circling round and round: pure silent darkness, slipping behind the bright flowers that rippled across its skin.
'We could make it to that whitelantern just there,' Gerry whispered. 'It couldn't run that fast.'
Both of us were watching that dark shadow moving through the trees, each of us slowly turning round and round so as to always be facing it. (We must have looked weird, standing there side by side and turning round together.) I glanced quickly at the tree Gerry was talking about and I saw he was right. We could easily make it, just so long as we didn't trip up on something while we ran. Of course the leopard would stop circling as soon as it saw us make a move. It would stop circling and attack, but if we chose our moment right we could be over at the tree and pulling ourselves up into the safety of its branches before it reached us. And then all we'd have to do is yell and wait and pretty soon Old Roger and David and Fox and all the rest would arrive hollering with their spears and bows and arrows, and the leopard would disappear back into forest. Grownups would tell us off for not staying in Cold Path Valley but we'd have a good story to tell, so they wouldn't really mind, specially if we spiced it up a little bit: the leopard's jaws snapping at our feet as we swung up into the branches, its cold eyes peering up at us ... all that stuff that people always put in to make things seem more exciting than they really were.
But then again, I thought, a story like that might be fine and good but it wouldn't reflect on us specially, would it? People would enjoy the story for a waking or two but it wouldn't make them think better of Gerry and me. We'd only have done what anyone would have done: spot a leopard, look for a tree, run.
'You run if you want,' I whispered – both of us were still slowly turning and turning round on the spot so as to be facing that dark dark creature circling round us – 'you run.'
'What? You ...'
But Gerry was too scared to stand and argue and so he ran, belting as fast as he could go across the clear space to the tree.
Well, I saw the leopard stop. I saw it turn. I saw its eyes flicker as it steadied itself to sprint towards him.
'Here,' I yelled. 'Over here!'
It turned its head back to look at me. Gerry scrambled into the lower branches of the tree and began to climb up to the top. The leopard crept slowly forwards in my direction and then stopped and watched me. Now that the beast was still, the spots down its sides stopped moving backwards and just flickered where they were like real starflowers do. Beneath them its skin was black black. Not black like black hair, not black like the feathers on a starbird, not black like a charred bit of wood. None of those are really black. But a leopard's skin has no fur or hair or feathers or scales. It doesn't catch the light. It doesn't have contours. It doesn't have different shades in it. It's black black like sky behind Starry Swirl. It's black black like a hole that goes right through to the bottom of everything, like Hole-in-Sky.
I felt like crying, I felt like yelling out that I'd made a mistake and I wanted the game to stop. I wished I'd just run like Gerry had done, like every other kid would have done, and every grownup too, unless they were in a whole gang of hunters and they had strong spears with proper blackglass heads. All I had was a kid's buck-hunting spear, with a shaft made from a redlantern sucker and a lousy spike off a spiketree shoved onto the end of it and glued there with boiled-down sap.
But there was no point in crying or yelling. There wasn't even any point in being scared. It wasn't as if I could tell the leopard I wanted to give up and not play any more, was it, like a kid playing hide and seek? It wasn't as if the leopard was going to say 'Fair enough then, mate, game over'. I'd made my choice and now I was stuck with it.
So I got myself in a good position and I readied my spear and I watched the leopard, waiting for its move. And I stopped having feelings. There was no point in feelings just then, so I made up my mind not to feel anything at all. I was quite good at that.
'Help!' Gerry began to holler from the treetop. 'Gela's sake, come and help us! It's a bloody leopard here! It's a big big leopard and it's going to eat John!'
'Shut up, Gerry, you idiot,' I hissed. 'You break my concentration and I bloody will get eaten.'
The leopard watched me. A leopard's eyes are round and flat and big as the palm of your hand, and they don't move in the leopard's head like our eyes do. They don't turn from side to side. But when you're up as close as I was, you can see that inside the eye there are things moving, little glints that shift and glitter. And it's like you're looking into the thoughts in its black head, like you can actually see them. You can see them, but you can't understand them. You can only see they're there.
The leopard began to sing.
Looking straight at my eyes with those blank glittery discs, it opened its mouth and out came that sweet sad slow song that leopards sing, in that sweet sad voice that they have, that voice that sounded just like a woman's. Everyone had heard it of course: that lonely ooooo-eeeee-aaaaa from far out in forest that sounded so human that you just couldn't help thinking it was human in some way. Everyone had woken up in middle of a sleep and heard it out there. And everyone had thought to themselves, Gela's heart, I am glad glad I'm here in Family with people all around me. And then they'd listened out for the friendly familiar sounds of other groups in Family with different wakings: folk cooking meat and scraping skins, folk building shelters with branches and bark, folk hacking at trees with their stone axes, folk chatting and laughing and arguing and shouting things to one another.
And that sweet sound of other people awake and busy, that gentle sound, it made the leopard off in forest seem far away, like another whole world, much too far away to think or worry about. It was just an animal after all, just an animal out there beyond the fence, hunting its prey in its own funny way, no different from a bat really, or a tree fox, or a tubeslinker. And so they sighed and rolled over, and got themselves comfortable among their sleeping skins and got themselves cosy and ready to go back to sleep. And it was almost cosier for them now than it was before, hearing that lonely leopard out there when they were safe and warm inside the fence, just like it was cosy cosy hearing rain on the bark roof of your shelter when you were dry and warm inside.
But for me all this wasn't happening out there beyond a fence. The leopard was here and I was here too. And it was singing not to some stonebuck or hopper it had cornered, but to me. It was singing me a lullaby, singing a lament for long ago, singing a song of love, a slowly fading song, slowly fading away, sinking back, peacefully fading back and back into the distance, fading and fading and fading until it was far away, not here at all any more, but lost and forgotten ...
And suddenly the beast was coming right at me, hurtling across the few yards of space that lay between us, its jaws open wide wide, its eyes glinting, its head down ready to kill, while its peaceful song lagged and faded behind it, just like its spots. I pulled myself out of the dream. I lifted my spear. I waited for my moment, knowing that I'd only get one shot at this, only one chance to get it right. I lifted my spear, and I readied it, and I told myself to hold steady and wait. Not yet ... Not yet ... Not yet ...
Now!
Michael's names, that next moment felt good! I got it just right. I shoved my spear into that leopard's mouth and it went right down its big hot throat.
Wham – the butt end of the spear caught me in the chest and sent me flying. Splat – a great big gout of the leopard's greeny-black blood came spurting out all over me. That big black beast crashed to the ground and began to thresh about, bubbling and gurgling and clawing at the horrible hard thing stuck in its throat that was stopping it from breathing. Quickly I rolled away from its flailing feet. Aaaargh-aaargh-aaargh, went the leopard, trying to knock away the spear, aaaargh-aaargh-aaargh. It was drowning. It was drowning in its own blood. Pretty soon it stopped making that noise and just gurgled and twitched a bit. And then it was still.
'Tom's dick, John, you've bloody killed it!'
Gerry had jumped down from the tree and was running towards me.
I scrambled to my feet. My head had gone all weird and I didn't know what to do or think or say.
'Lucy Lu reckons leopards are dead women,' was what I came out with, talking in a funny bright voice. 'You know, Shadow People. She says that's why their voices sound like that and their songs are so sad sad. Of course it's crap, like everything she says. I mean ...'
'What are you on about, John, you bloody idiot? You did for it, look! All by yourself! Tom's neck, you did for it all by yourself.'
I was shaking all over. I couldn't have been shaking any more, I reckon, if I'd just spent an hour wandering around naked on Snowy Dark.
'I'll tell you a funny thing,' I said, 'when we saw those woollybucks up there on the snow, I thought for a moment they were a Landing Veekle from Earth. Hah! That was pretty dumb of me, wasn't it?'
Gerry laughed.
'Tom's dick, John! You just killed a leopard!'
'But I suppose one waking someone will come, won't they? They say the starship was damaged when Angela and Michael chased after it in their Police Veekle and tried to stop it. They say it leaked. But even if the starship broke on the way back, and even if the Three Companions died, the people on Earth would find it sooner or later, wouldn't they? I mean it had a Computer, didn't it, and a Rayed Yo? Okay it's two hundred wombtimes ago now that they left Eden. But think how long it must take to build a new starship. I mean it takes old Jeffo half a wombtime just to build one lousy log boat to fish with out on Greatpool.'
Gerry took my shoulders and shook me.
'Gela's tits, John, will you stop talking about bloody sky-boats! You've killed a leopard! All by yourself! With a kid's spear!'
It was weird weird. The leopard was still twitching in front of me, I was covered with its black blood, and I was shaking shaking all over. But tears came into my eyes as I thought about the Three Companions, who left Tommy and Angela on Eden to try and get back to Earth: Dixon, who had the idea to steal the starship, and Mehmet, who Angela liked best because he was kind, and gentle Michael, who named the animals and plants. I wished I knew just what happened to them when they set off back across sky to Earth in their leaky sky-boat.
And I wished we knew how long it would be before someone came for us from Earth.