Dark Eden

way in the empty space under the trees, and I could hear them all talking when I was still ten twenty yards away.
    ‘There’s bucks everywhere in this place, aren’t there?’ said Janny. ‘Getting meat is going to be
easy
easy from now on.’
    ‘We’ll just wear a few more wraps than we used to and it’ll be fine,’ said Tina’s sister Jane.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Gela, ‘and we should be able to make shelters a bit stronger than usual to keep out the cold.’
    ‘Plenty of starflowers everywhere, I must say,’ said Julie Blueside.
    ‘But fruits are too high to reach to reach, though, aren’t they?’ worried Lucy London, looking up at the trees with her bulging eyes.
    ‘Yeah,’ said Tina in a bright bright voice that didn’t sound like her normal way of speaking at all, ‘but we can use ropes, or make nets, can’t we? We’ll have plenty of time for jobs like that, when meat is so easy to get.’
    That was the story they were telling each other: Tall Tree Valley was going to be
fine
fine. And if one of them started to tell another story, then someone else would straightaway put them right.
    ‘Whole time we’ve been here I’ve not heard one leopard,’ Janny said. ‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’
    ‘We’re going to miss Family,’ sighed Lucy London. ‘I wish we weren’t so far from them.’
    ‘But we’ve got each other, haven’t we?’ Jane said quickly. ‘We’ve got each other. And we’re nearly grownups after all, aren’t we?’
    ‘Do you reckon those snow leopards come down here?’ asked Lucy Batwing. ‘I couldn’t cope with them again.’
    ‘I don’t see why,’ Gela told her, in the same bright bright voice that Tina had used. ‘They didn’t ever come down into Circle Valley, did they? Not even as far down as the hills. If they did, we would have known about them before, wouldn’t we? And like Janny said, we haven’t even heard an ordinary forest leopard here, and you’d think we would have done by now, if there were any, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘I
like
it here,’ Tina said firmly. ‘I like these tall tall trees.’
    ‘Yeah. And did you see those flying monkeys?’ asked Mike, coming over from his work on the fence to get some meat.
    ‘I’m scared about having my baby here,’ said Julie Blueside, ‘with no oldmums near to help.’
    ‘We’ve got Clare and Janny,’ Gela said in that bright bright voice. She had a baby inside her too, and so she must have been worried about the same thing. ‘They might not be oldmums, but they’ve been through it, haven’t they? They’ll know what to do.’
    ‘But they had help from their mums over by Lava Blob, didn’t they?’
    ‘Try this buckmeat, Mike,’ Jane said loudly, ‘it’s
good
good.’
    ‘Harry loves it! Harry loves it! It’s the best meat ever.’
    Of course they could all see just as well as I could that Tall Tree Valley was small and cold and lonely, but they didn’t want to let thoughts get into their heads about setting out again for somewhere else, not after what had happened up in Dark. So they were trying to squash each other’s doubts and fears, and talk themselves into feeling at home. But it was
thin
thin, this hopeful talk of theirs. It was thin thin thin. Just underneath the surface of it was the memory of that horrible cold dark place where Suzie Fishcreek died, and where they’d
all
almost died, groping their way like blind oldies through darkness and ice. Harry’s dick, they’d have talked themselves into any damn thing rather than face that again.
    I walked up to the fire.
    ‘Hey there, John,’ said Tina and some of the others, but Mehmet busied himself with sharpening the tip of his spear and didn’t look up.
    ‘Yeah, we can definitely make something of this place,’ he said, carrying on with the talk they’d been having as if I hadn’t arrived. ‘We were lucky lucky to stumble on it.’
    I fetched some starflowers and buckmeat for my breakfast, and sat myself on a stone next to Janny, whose baby Flower was sucking at her breast, almost hidden away inside the buckskin bodywrap that she’d made specially with an opening at the front. When I’d swallowed down the flowers and the meat I stood up.
    ‘We need to find out more about this valley,’ I said. ‘We need to see if there are ways out of it, and what lives here, and we need to check out the possibilities and the dangers before we dig in too deep in this one spot. I know we can’t spare many people from the jobs