Chris Beckett - Dark Eden

‘It’s okay, Gerry,’ Clare told him quickly. ‘Jeff’s not badly hurt or anything, and . . .’

She broke off, because for the first time she noticed the woollybuck with the wrap over its head.

‘Michael’s names! What is that ?’

‘It’s a woollybuck,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s a live woollybuck. Hold its rope for a bit, will you, Clare? I’d better run up and see Jeff.’

It was strange. All this time the buckling had been shrieking and screaming — for its mum, I suppose, though she was dead and dangling from a branch right beside it — but neither Clare or Gela had even noticed it until that moment, just like we hadn’t noticed them screaming and yelling up ahead. Something that I’d begun to notice was that people often don’t see things they aren’t expecting to be there, even if it’s right in front of their faces. It was a useful thing to know. It meant there were always more possibilities in a situation than people realized.

But now Tina’s brother Harry came thumping down the path. He was all red and sweaty, his breathing was heavy and his eyes were big and rolling around in his head. My heart sank. I’d seen him like this back in Family once twice.

‘Gela’s tits,’ muttered Tina. ‘He’ll stay that way for hours and hours.’

‘Hey Tina and John!’ shouted Harry in his baby way. ‘Harry drove them away with his club, Harry did. They tried to take Janny, Tina, but I drove them away.’

‘That’s good Harry,’ soothed Tina. ‘Well done! That’s good good.’

Gerry was already dabbing at Jeff with a wet buckskin when we got up to the caves. My little cousin had some bruised ribs and a black eye, but that didn’t stop him jumping up and hobbling over as soon as he saw the little buckling. From then on he was like its new mum. He never left it. He even pulled his own sleeping skin out of the cave where he slept with Gerry and laid it down for the buckling in the cave that the two of them had fenced off for a horse.

Dix went off for some hot embers from one of our back-up fire holes and got our main fire going again. He felt badly that he’d not been there when David Redlantern’s lot arrived, and he kept apologizing to us all. Personally, I reckoned it was lucky that he hadn’t been there. If he hadn’t come running down the hill when David’s lot weren’t expecting it, he wouldn’t have been scary enough. He was a nice boy, a lovely boy, and nicely built too, but he really wasn’t that big or scary. If he’d been there all along, maybe they’d never have let themselves be driven away.

We took John’s leopard tooth knife and hacked off a leg from the little buckling’s dead mum, then we cooked it up with whitelantern fruit that the others had gathered while we’d been away. Janny cried a bit. She had some nasty bruises too from where the men had grabbed her. Gela and Clare cried a bit as well, and that made Gela’s brother Dix start up again about how sorry he was for not being there.

‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, Dix,’ I told him, ‘will you give it a bloody rest? You weren’t on lookout or anything, were you? So you didn’t do anything wrong going up the hill looking for stuff to eat, no more than we did anything wrong looking for bucks.’

‘Lookout?’ Dix said. ‘Why don’t I go on lookout now? It was supposed to be Janny now but I reckon she could do with a rest. I’ll do the first watch and let you lot get some sleep.’

(Of course we didn’t have groups of people sleeping and waking at different times in our camp like in Family. We were just one group and we all slept and woke up more or less together.)

‘Yeah, alright,’ I said. ‘Harry can be lookout with you, can’t you, Harry? I mean there’s no way you’re going to calm down, is there, Harry mate, for several hours at least? I reckon you could do with walking up and down a bit on lookout, to work off some of that tension.’

Pretty soon all the rest of us except for Jeff lay down and tried to rest. Not that it was easy to rest with everything that had happened going through our heads and that bloody little buckling screaming and screaming in its cave.

After a couple of hours Dix and Harry came to get me and John to take over their watch. John went down the hill to keep an eye on the path up to our camp from forest. I went up the hill, above the caves, to look out over the main valley, and to make sure no one came sneaking down from above.

I was so tired tired, what with the hunt and everything, that I had to keep moving around to stop myself from falling off to sleep. Even so I did nod off for a bit, right there on my feet. It wasn’t for long, I don’t think, but when I woke up I could tell straight off that there was something different. Something had changed.

Well, then I really woke up. It’s a bad bad lookout that goes to sleep and misses some new thing until after it’s already started happening. Like the saying goes, ‘It’s too late to yell leopard if it’s already inside the fence.’

But what was it that was different? I listened and listened until I felt as if my ears were sticking out of my head on stalks like a buck’s feelers. The world sounded different in some way and yet when I listened to each separate sound on its own, I could only hear ordinary things, things you heard all the time: bird calls and the little gabbling cries of bats, streams trickling over stones as they came down from Snowy Dark, hmmph , hmmph , hmmph from nearby trees, the steady hmmmmm of forest . . . Just ordinary familiar Eden things, things that were there all the time, like the lanterns shining away below.

‘John?’ I called softly. ‘John?’

I wanted to ask him if he’d noticed anything or if he could figure out what was different, but he was too far off to hear me and I didn’t want to shout too loudly. And anyway just then I finally realized what the difference was. It wasn’t a new sound at all. It was a sound missing. The buckling had gone quiet. It had finally stopped its screaming. Maybe it’s died, I thought, though I can’t say I cared that much. My main thought was thank Gela it wasn’t some new attack that I’d missed! And I looked forward to going back down to my sleeping skin and getting off to sleep without that bloody noise going on and on.

All the same, when my watch was done and I went down to wake Jane to take over from me, I passed by the buckling’s cave to see what had happened. Jeff wasn’t lying outside on his skin any more so I guessed he must have gone back to sleep with Gerry like he normally did, and I looked over the fence to see what had happened to the buck. The little animal wasn’t dead. It was lying asleep on the ground with its headlantern softly glowing. But the big surprise was Jeff. He was in there too, lying there with it, with one arm draped over its woolly back, just like it was Gerry, just like him and Gerry usually lay together on their sleeping skins.

Two brothers on a skin was one thing, though. A woollybuck and a human being was something else. A little clawfoot boy and a creature with flat glinting eyes that never shut, lying down together! Well, it just seemed so weird weird that I had to get John just to show him. I was so amazed amazed, it was almost like I needed John to tell me that what I saw was really there.

‘Looks like he’s got his horse then,’ John whispered.

‘I’d honestly never never have thought such a thing could happen,’ I whispered back to him. ‘Mind you, I’d never have thought that someone would destroy Circle of Stones either or break up Family into two pieces.’

I put my arm round John’s waist, feeling sort of proud of what he’d managed to make happen, admiring the strength that made it possible. But he didn’t respond. He had never once reached out for me, this bloke I’d given up my Family for, not once since that time when me and Jeff and Gerry first came over.