Dark Eden

the trunk. We could even hear it faintly.
Hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
: that old familiar sound.
    Everyone started to talk at once, and to hurry down the snowy slope towards it to get to the heat of its trunk. Harry rushed out in front and sank in snow right up to his neck. Lucy Batwing sank to her armpits, Dave Fishcreek to his waist. All the excited chattering and shouting turned to screams of fear and I had to yell to everyone to stop and wait and calm down while we threw a rope to each of the three of them and hauled them out.
    ‘Now keep following Def, alright?’ I yelled to everyone. ‘It knows the way across this stuff. We don’t.’
    I just hoped that Def was planning to go down to the tree and not stay on top of the ridge, because I wasn’t sure how I would manage to persuade all these tired scared people that it was okay to walk back into Dark without first getting the warmth and light and comfort of a tree.
    Luckily the horsebuck
did
go down to the tree. It led us along the ridge to the right a bit, round the edge of the soft snow, and then down into the valley of snow where the tree grew. And as we went towards the tree we began to see that it was even bigger, and the valley much deeper, than we had first thought, because it took much much longer to reach it than we’d expected. That tree was
tall
tall, fifteen twenty times the height of a man. But just as we were getting near enough to get a sense of the real size of it, another strange thing happened that threw us out again, so we once more doubted whether we were seeing it right.
    A bat dropped down from sky and landed at the top of the tree. It stood there like bats do, gently fanning its wings, rubbing its face with its hands and staring down at us with its head tipped slightly over to one side like it was weighing us up, with steam from an airhole ten feet below billowing up around it. But it was
much
bigger than any bat we’d ever seen before. The biggest bats you ever found in forest were redbats and they were maybe a foot and a half from head to toe. But this one must have been the height of a child of fifteen wombs or so, and the distance between the tips of its pale wings must have been six feet at least. And it was a weird thing because, even though it had wings, and knees that bent backwards, and claws for feet, and a bat’s face that was all twists and wrinkles, and no nose, it felt to me almost like it was a
person
up there looking down at us.
    And then we all saw something that the bat didn’t see. Out of an airhole came the head of a slinker. It swayed from side to side for a moment, as slinkers’ heads do when they’re looking for bats and birds and flutterbyes. And then, pressing itself up close to the trunk, it began to creep up the tree, not straight up, but slowly winding round and round the trunk towards the bat. Harry’s dick, it was a
long
long slinker. It must have been fifteen foot long at least, I reckon, with dozens of little clawed feet all along it.
    But the bat was still rubbing its face and watching us. We’d all stopped to stare at it except only for Jeff on the back of Def, which kept plodding along regardless. And the bat seemed to notice the fact that we weren’t moving any more and to wonder why that was, because it stopped rubbing its face, and lifted its head, and half-lowered its hands, like we’d got it worried, or puzzled, or maybe just interested. But it still hadn’t seen the slinker, whose head by now was only a yard beneath it.
    I don’t know why, but suddenly I yelled out.
    ‘Watch out!’ I shouted. ‘Watch out!’
    The people behind me laughed. Who ever heard of someone yelling a warning to an animal as if it was a person like us? But all the same a few of the others began to yell too, ‘Watch out, bat, that slinker’s going to get you!’
    And the bat stiffened, and looked around itself, and passed its right hand once over its face, and stretched its wings out a bit, but didn’t move. And the slinker crept closer.
    ‘Watch out!’ I yelled again.
    And finally, in the last second that it had left, the bat seemed to get the message. It leapt up into the air just as the slinker struck. Those spiny slinker jaws snapped, only missing the bat by a couple of feet, but the bat was safe, soaring up into the freezing air.
    The slinker’s head, sticking up above the top of the tree, swayed from side to side, watching the bat, then twisting round to look down at us. And then the creature went