Chris Beckett: Dark Eden

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.