Dark Eden

Met dragged away the branches that made the Batwing gateway.
    ‘Leopard kill!’ Old Roger hollered out. ‘Jade’s boy killed a bloody leopard!’
    ‘John did for it,’ yelled Gerry excitedly, ‘my cousin John!’
    Lately the grownups in most of the groups had decided we needed more food-trees in Family to help with our problem of not enough to eat. They’d decided we’d have to get rid of trees whose fruits were no good as food, like redlanterns. And when we’d set out six wakings before, Batwing had been busy chopping down a big redlantern tree, and they’d been at it all the time we’d been away, hacking away at that tree with stone axes for four wakings. They’d finally managed to pull it down with ropes maybe two three hours before we got there, and when we came in through the fence, there was the big tree lying on the ground with bits of broken axes strewn around it. (Someone would need to go over to Blue Hills soon for more blackglass.) The ground was still warm and sticky with sap.
    Some little kid had got himself in the wrong place when the hot hot sap sprayed out. He’d been badly burnt.
Burnt
burnt. If he lived he’d have the scars forever. And now he was yelling and yelling in a shelter, and his mum sobbing by his side. Everything was spoiled for him and her, everything wrecked, by one stupid moment. But the rest of Batwing were pleased pleased with their work. They were walking round that great big fallen thing, and whacking at it with sticks and talking about what a bugger it’d been to get down, and how much bark they’d get off it, and how much wood. And the kids were looking forward to eating the stumpcandy. And everyone was trying not to notice the screaming kid in the shelter.
    ‘Boy killed a leopard!’ Old Roger boomed out again. ‘Young newhair. Jade’s boy John.’
    John and Gerry were carrying the dead thing tied onto two branches. I was walking behind them, with ugly old David and handsome shallow Fox. Four others were carrying the big woollybuck that four of us had cornered and done for about the same time as John got the leopard. A lot of eating that buck was going to give, and a lot of skin and bones too to make wraps and tools with, and normally everyone would have been impressed, but now all they were interested in was the leopard. They came running over to touch that weird black skin that was so smooth smooth that it was almost like touching nothing at all. They wanted to look into its dead dead eyes. They wanted to feel the ridges down its sides where the starflower spots had glittered and flowed when it was alive.
    ‘Look at the big black teeth on it,’ the Batwings said, reaching out to touch.
    ‘Careful with them,’ said Old Roger, though a leopard’s teeth aren’t exactly fragile. ‘They belong to Redlantern, don’t forget. We don’t want good knives damaged.’
    ‘I saw him kill it,’ Gerry kept saying over and over. ‘I was up in a tree and I saw it! John could have climbed a tree too but no, that’s not my cousin John. He faced it all by himself with an ordinary kid’s buck-spear. Imagine that! Just an ordinary spear with a spiketree tip.’
    And Gerry looked around at the impressed Batwings, and the people from other groups who’d started to appear: Fishcreek, Spiketree, Brooklyn. He was thrilled, because no one had ever been so interested in what he had to say. (He wasn’t a boy that was particularly funny or clever or interesting. He didn’t really even have opinions of his own. I’d hardly even noticed him until now.)
    ‘
And
he killed it cleanly in one go,’ Gerry told them all. ‘One single stab.’
    ‘Well, he wouldn’t be here to tell about it if he hadn’t, would he?’ said a Batwing boy about mine and John’s age. ‘It’s not like a leopard’s going to stand there and let you have a second go.’
    The boy was called Mehmet. He was named, like a lot of people were, for Mehmet Haribey, who was one of the Three Companions. But, though the True Story said that Mehmet Haribey was friendly and kind, Mehmet Batwing didn’t look all that friendly. He had a narrow clever face and a little pointy yellow beard, and he was a sarky bugger who liked to find fault with people.
    Well, I can be pretty sarky myself when I want to be, and I can deal with sarky people, no trouble, but Gerry didn’t know how to handle them at all. I saw him look at Mehmet and frown, but he really couldn’t work out what exactly Mehmet was getting at, so he