Dark Eden

of light from the dark sky, crowding in on us in their hundreds and thousands, settling all over us and over the bucks and over those heavy bark snow-boats that we were still dragging along behind us.
    When you are really tired and miserable, I’ve noticed, one thing that comes to help you is rhythm. If you can only get into a rhythm then you can keep going, because it’s like a kind of sleep. But if someone talks, or someone stops, or something happens, and the rhythm’s broken, that’s when it becomes hard to bear. And so we trudged and trudged, and we didn’t say anything for a long long time.
    We’d been going for one two hours, the babies quiet, no one talking, our feet scrunch-scrunch-scrunching in the snow, when Dix suddenly spoke.
    ‘What’s that sound?’
    Oh shut up, was what I thought. I don’t care about any bloody sound. I just want to concentrate on the scrunch, scrunch, scrunch of my cold cold feet. But other people along the line had heard it too, and stopped, and some were talking and some were telling each other to shhhhhh so we could hear. The bucks stopped too. They both stopped dead, listening.
    It was like a faint cry –
aaaaaaaah!
– from some dark rocks we could just make out in the bucklight up to our left.
    Def and Whitehorse both started to snuffle and groan.
    ‘The Shadow People! Lucy Lu was right, it must be the Shadow People,’ someone muttered.
    And there was a sort of moan up and down the line.
    ‘No, it’s not,’ called out John, ‘it’s some kind of leopard. Get your spears ready. Hold onto the bucks.’
    Gerry and Gela ran forward to hold onto the buck that Jeff was riding on. Suzie and Dave grabbed hold of Whitehorse at the back. Both animals were tugging and straining to get free, and giving little thin squeaks of fear:
Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!
    Aaaaaaaah!
came the cry again, high and lonely.
    We all stood in a row, straining to see the thing in the faint light.
    Then suddenly Mehmet called out.
    ‘No! It’s behind us! Turn!’
    Wham!
It was on top of us. While we were looking the wrong way, a great white furry beast had been rushing silently towards us across the surface of the snow. Now it grabbed Whitehorse with its jaws and front claws, snatching the buck away from Suzie and Dave and dragging it and its light away across the snow, leaving a thin black trail of blood. Suzie and Dave tried to follow it, but off the path that Def had found for us the snow was soft and deep and they were in above their knees straight away. They couldn’t run over the top of snow like the leopard could.
    So now the back end of the line no longer had its own light. Standing in the near darkness, we watched the snow leopard out there in the pool of light from Whitehorse’s head, ripping out Whitehorse’s throat. It was bigger than a forest leopard and covered with shaggy white fur like a woollybuck. Its four back feet were great flat things splayed out over the snow and, as well as two flat black eyes, it seemed to have a huge third eye on the top of its head, much bigger than the other two and kind of hollow, like a bowl. Seeing us watching it, it lifted its head from its meal and tipped it back slightly, like it was looking up at the mountainside. And then we heard a cry again –
Aaaaaaaah!
– and all of us looked round, because the cry didn’t seem to come from the leopard at all but from far away above and behind us.
    Crunch! While our backs were turned, it bit the lantern off the top of the dead buck’s half-severed head, swallowed it, and so hid itself in darkness. And at that same moment, out at the front end of the line, Def gave a loud loud screech and pulled free of Gerry and Gela to belt off along the snowy valley with Jeff still clinging onto its back.
    And that was the last of our light. It had been all we had left, that little pool of light moving through the falling snow, and now it was vanishing into the distance with the small shadow of Jeff’s back in middle of it, leaving us in total darkness.
    Aaaaaaaah!
went the snow leopard’s voice again, remote and dreamy and far away behind us. And in the same moment the leopard itself – not remote and dreamy at all but huge and strong with deadly claws and teeth – was upon us again. A forest leopard kills just once, but I suppose it makes sense for a snow leopard to kill again and again, quickly biting off the headlanterns of bucks and then coming back for more until they’ve got a stash of frozen meat to