Dark Eden

keep them going till the next herd comes by.
    For a moment, we felt it among us. We heard a girl scream, and then, a few yards off, we heard her give a choking sound and fall silent, and we knew that the leopard had dragged her out of the line and had done for her in dark there as it had done for Whitehorse.
    No one was sure who it was. Everyone was calling out for sisters and friends.
    ‘Tina, are you okay?’ went Dix, feeling for me with his hands.
    ‘Jane,’ I called out for my sister. ‘Jane, are you there?’
    ‘Lucy? Clare? Candy?’ other voices were calling, and other voices answering in the darkness, until someone called ‘Suzie!’ and no answer came from Suzie Fishcreek, that sharp clever girl, and we knew that if we could have seen anything at all out there it would have been her blood that would have been red on the snow, hers and the baby’s still inside her, and her lolling head hanging loose from her neck.
    Then John’s voice came bellowing out over all the crying and wailing:
    ‘Group together, now! Group together with your spears pointing out! Do you want the thing to get us all one by one? Together in a group with your spears out! Now! Do it! Quick!’

32

Jeff Redlantern

    Def ran and ran and I couldn’t hold him back. All I could do was hang on tightly tightly to his fur, lying down flat against his body. I knew that if I fell off in the dark and the snow, that would have been that, that would have been the end of me. The world would still have had lots of other eyes to see through, but not mine.
    Def ran on and on down that long dark snowy valley. His headlantern was pulsing and bright bright with fear, and he kept giving out a strange cry I’d never heard him make before:
Ayeeee! Ayeeee!
I heard the echoes come back from the rocks and mountains. Big snowflakes crowded towards me and rushed past. I got glimpses of huge rocks and cliffs and giant greenish hunks of ice jutting out from under the snow.
    When we’d been running for some time flat out, he slowed down a little bit. I could see that the snowy ground ahead of us was breaking up and tipping down, and there were more and more of those big twisted hunks of ice sticking up, and icy cracks opening up in the snow. It was a big snowslug we’d been on all this time, I realized. Up to now it had been covered up by packed-down snow, but here the ice was cracking and bending and sticking out through the snow, like splintered bones sticking out through a broken leg.
    Ayeeee! Ayeeee!
went Def. He paused for a moment and then called out again:
Ayeee! Ayeee!
Suddenly he swerved to the left, and started climbing the rocky slopes above the snowslug, up up, until he came to the top of a ridge, and we could look down at the other side.
    There was light below us! There were thousands of lights, white and greeny-yellow. There was a little round valley full of shining trees, surrounded by Snowy Dark.
    Ayeee! Ayeee!
, went Def.
    I put my hand on the soft lantern on his head and tried to make him turn round again so we could go back to tell the others. He had always let me guide him that way before. It was him that found the paths, but when we came to a choice of paths, he would pause and lift his head and snuffle and sniff at the air, and wave his feelers, and then I chose for him, by putting my hand on his lantern and turning his head in the direction I wanted him to go. Woollybucks could stay up on Snowy Dark for wakings and wakings, I figured, but we needed to get down the other side. So I made sure, as best I could, that we kept heading
across
Peckham Hills, and not along them.
    But now, on the top of the ridge, Def refused to do what I asked of him. I could turn his head all I liked but he wasn’t going to go back. I guess the leopard was still not far enough behind.
    He wasn’t going to stay still either.
Ayeeee!
he cried out again, and started straight down towards the lights of the valley. I pulled back on his headlantern to try and get him to at least stop still, but he took no notice at all. There was nothing I could do to make him change his mind, nothing I could do at all really, right then, except just to remind myself to keep my eyes open and to notice the world that I was in.
    ‘We are here,’ I whispered to myself, ‘we are really here.’
    I might never see the others again, I thought. I might die on my own, and no one would ever know what I’d seen. But that didn’t change the fact that right now I
was
seeing it. I was