Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

With our wraps on, looking like some strange new kind of creature, me and Tina and Gerry walked up the path. This wasn’t just a buck hunt to me, it was a first step to getting ourselves right up on Snowy Dark. There’s a faint picture, scratched on a tree near Circle Clearing, called ‘The Astronaut’ made by Tommy or Gela or one of the Three Companions. It’s a man in a strange Sky Wrap that lets him live in places so high up in sky that there’s no air left to breathe. It’s one of the people who found a way of getting outside of Earth. And I felt pretty much like an Astronaut now, walking up the path with Gerry and Tina in those stiff hot fuggy wraps. I felt like an Astronaut taking his first steps up into sky.

And the wraps pretty much worked! They got a bit wet in places, specially round our feet, so that still needed working on. But even right up there by the ice, our bodies stayed warm warm, and even though our feet got a bit wet, they weren’t cold like they’d have been if our feet had been bare. They weren’t hurting like they did when we came up with Old Roger.

Five bucks came down from Dark with their headlanterns shining bright bright: four big ones and a little baby one trailing along at the end. We scrambled up the hillside off the path and waited until they’d gone right past us — I reckoned the wraps helped here too, because they made us smell of woollybuck and not of human being — then we crept down behind them, making starbird noises to signal to the others below to be ready for them. The bucks trudged slowly on with us behind them, their headlanterns fading to a soft glow as they left Snowy Dark behind them and got down into the light and warmth of the trees.

An hour later, near the bottom of the path, we did another starbird cry. Hoom! Hoom!

Aaaah! Aaaah! the others answered.

We found a place where the path went through a narrow gap in the rocks and hid up above there.

Aaaah! Aaaah! the other four called again, and then suddenly they all stopped trying to sound like starbirds and began to yell like excited newhairs so we knew that the bucks must have spotted them and would now be running back towards us again up the path.

Gerry got the first one with his spiketip spear as it came up to the gap: a good shot straight up and under its neck into its chest. The spearhead went directly into one of its hearts and Gerry was covered in thick black blood.

Now the other bucks didn’t know what to do. The slopes to the side were stony and steep steep. With six legs each the bucks could still easily climb them, but they couldn’t climb quickly, and they knew it, and that made them hesitate, like they thought there might be another option. And meanwhile we were coming at them from above and below. Two of them did manage to get away up the slope but we did for another of the big ones while it was stumbling on the stones. (Mehmet said the glory of it was his, but it was hard to know for sure who’d got it first, because it had spears sticking out of it all over when it went down.)

We were pleased pleased.

‘We’d never have got these bucks if we hadn’t set up over here,’ I told the others later. ‘That was my point to Caroline, remember? In these short dips, bucks would have been down and up again before any one from back in Family could have made it over here.’

But doing for the grownup bucks was only part of it. The best part, the strangest part, and the thing that none of us had seen or heard of being done before, was that I’d dived onto the baby buck while Gerry was doing for its mother and I’d managed to hold it down on the ground.

Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! The little thing was threshing about like crazy, kicking with its clawed feet and squealing and squealing and shrieking enough to make your ears feel like they were going to burst. Its headlantern was flashing flashing flashing, its feelers were waving frantically, and its big round mouth opened wide and closed and opened wide again like it couldn’t get enough air to breathe. It had nearly thrown me off when Tina jumped on it too, and then so did Jane and Mehmet. Lucy and Mike got the rope we’d brought with us and made a knot round its neck, tight but not so tight as to choke it, and another tied round one of its back legs, and I had the idea of taking the wrap off my head and sticking it over the head of the little buck so it couldn’t see. And then Lucy and Mike and Mehmet held it, squealing and pulling and threshing, while me and Tina and Gerry got our own sweltering wraps off. Mine were all ripped open by the buckling’s kicking legs and I had a big bloody gash across my arm, which I hadn’t even noticed in the excitement.

We took it in turns to carry back the two dead bucks, lashed by the feet to branches, and to drag along the little living one, stumbling over the stones with the wrap over its head. And the creature made such a racket on the way back, shrieking and squealing and scrabbling away with its feet, that we never heard the yelling and shouting of the others back at camp. The first time we knew that something bad had happened back there was when two of the others came running down the rocks: big tall sensible Gela and her clever little sister Clare.

We’d left six of them back by the caves, but Dix had gone up the hill with a bow and some arrows, looking for monkeys, so there were only five there when they came from Family: David Redlantern and big stupid Met, who used to be friends with Gerry and me, and fat old Dixon Blueside and three other newhair boys. They’d kicked out our fire, taken whatever skins and meat they could find and tried to drag Janny back with them to Family and Redlantern group.

‘Harry went crazy,’ said Tina’s friend Gela in her deep voice. ‘You should have seen that brother of yours, Tina. He just went at those men with a big club. He went straight at them, bellowing and yelling, so the two who’d got hold of Janny had to let go and back off because they could see he’d mash them like a slinker.’

‘So then Janny ran back to us,’ Clare went on. She was a small girl, quite quiet normally, who’d make a little sharp comment and then back off again, like a groundcreeper into its hole, but she was shaking shaking now, too scared and upset about what had happened to worry about anything else. ‘So then we all grabbed sticks and spears and started screaming and yelling, all together, like we do when a leopard gets too near back in Family. Only it wasn’t really like that, because it wasn’t one leopard and a whole big lot of us, it was six of them, all blokes and two of them grownup men, and only five of us. Our Dix — Dix Brooklyn — he was up the hill somewhere, looking for bats or something, so aside from little Jeff, Harry was the only bloke we had. I’ll tell you, we were scared scared .’

‘Yeah,’ Gela said. ‘Harry worried them for a short time when he came at them with his club, so we followed that up as best we could by screaming and waving spears, but pretty soon they worked out it was still them that had the advantage. You could see them starting to figure that out. You could see the fear fading and the ugly grins starting to appear again on their faces. They were just beginning to come at us again when Dix came charging down the hill, yelling and waving his spear.’

‘I reckon they thought it was all of you lot coming back,’ Clare said, ‘because they took one look at him, grabbed the skins and stuff that they’d nicked, and ran . I don’t think they realized it was just one bloke on his own. But little Jeff was standing off to the side and one of those Blueside boys shoved him over on the ground and kicked him before he ran off . . .’

‘What?’ Gerry cried out once. ‘Is he . . .?’