Dark Eden

waving them from side to side to try and stop it sneaking in between. But spears are only bits of wood, and most of ours didn’t even have proper blackglass heads. That huge white leopard could knock them aside like twigs.
    ‘Remember it’s never met humans before,’ John called out. ‘It doesn’t know what we are. It can’t possibly know that we can’t see it. Let’s try and scare it. Shout! Scream! Yell as loud as you can!’
    Well, we didn’t want to do that at
all
. If you can’t see, you certainly don’t want to stop being able to hear as well. What we wanted was perfect perfect silence, so we could listen, listen, listen.
    But John started yelling, and then Tina. So I joined in, and then more and more people began screaming and yelling and shouting. And of course that made the babies yell too, and the echoes from all of us came back from the rocks on both sides of us, so it soon felt like the biggest thing in whole world was that screaming and screaming and screaming all around us. And the weird thing was that once we’d started, we didn’t want to stop. The screaming said how we felt. The screaming filled up the world with our feelings. And even though those feelings might be ones of fear and misery, they were so big big that they pushed away the ice and darkness, and made them seem far away.
    But even all that screaming couldn’t completely blot out our own thoughts. We all knew the leopard was only the beginning of our troubles. Even if we drove it away, what was going to happen next? How could we ever get ourselves out of this when we had no light to guide us and no idea where we were or where we were trying to get to?
    ‘What are we going to do?’ yelled some people in middle of our screaming. ‘What are we bloody going to do?’
    And some just cried, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!’
    But no one’s mum was going to come, were they? Nobody’s mum could put this right.
    ‘Alright!’ yelled John. ‘It’s gone! It’s gone! Shut up now and listen!’
    So the crying and yelling stopped, but slowly slowly, because now we’d started we were just as afraid to face the silence again as we had been afraid in the first place to cover the silence up. We’d found a sort of comfort in all that noise.
    ‘How do we know it’s gone?’ came Clare’s voice in the darkness, when we’d finally quietened down.
    ‘Because it would have attacked by now if it was still here,’ John said. ‘We’ve scared it off. We’ve showed it we’re not like bucks, we’re not like anything it knows.’
    ‘So what will we do now?’
    ‘Where are the snow-boats?’ John asked. ‘Who’s got the fire? I’ve got strings dipped in buckgrease we can light up to show us the way. We can follow Def’s tracks over the snow.’
    So people lowered their spears and began groping around in Dark. The ones pulling snow-boats had let go of them when the leopard struck, and no one knew where they were. Someone ran into someone else’s spear and cursed. Someone knocked someone else over. But we found a bark snow-boat with a pile of skins on it, and another one with smoked meat and cakes, and then . . . and then we heard Gela Brooklyn give a sort of low wail.
    ‘It’s turned over, John. Must have been when the leopard came at us. It’s turned over and the fire stone’s gone. We haven’t got any fire.’
    It was so bad now that no one said anything, not even Mehmet. There was a long silence. And when John finally spoke you could hear the fear in his voice, however hard he tried not to let it show.
    ‘Okay . . . Well . . . we’ll . . . we’ll have to . . . to feel our way forward, then. I’ll go in front and feel for Def’s tracks. The snow’s stopped falling, hasn’t it, so at least the tracks won’t fill in. It’ll be slow, but we’ll manage.’
    Well, there wasn’t any other choice, was there? We left the snow-boats behind and John went in front, feeling with his wrapped fingers for the dents in the snow where Def’s six feet had trod. He had to do it slowly slowly – Def’s wide feet didn’t make big holes like a human’s feet – and we had to hope that it wouldn’t start snowing anytime soon and fill them in. Slowly slowly we moved forward in a line, tied together by ropes, but most of the time holding hands with each other as well to make sure. Shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait – shuffle forward – wait. We were
cold
cold. You couldn’t get warmed up going so slowly. We knew it