Dark Eden

Aaaaaaaah!
    A snow leopard. Gela’s heart! Lucy London burst into tears, and quite a few of the others began to sob and moan and rock.
    ‘We’ll be alright,’ I told everyone. ‘We’ll be alright. Even forest leopards don’t like fire, do they?’
    ‘That’s right,’ Tina said straight away. ‘And snow leopards aren’t used to
any
sort of light, are they? So they’ll be even more scared if anything’
    We were
trying
to be cheerful, but weirdly John suddenly seemed like he
really was
happy happy.
    ‘Snow. Cold. Leopards,’ he said cheerfully, jumping up to get more wood for the fire. ‘It’s like Dark’s come down to get us, isn’t it? It’s like we haven’t really got away from it at all.’
    He chucked a log onto the flames and looked around at us with a big smile on his face.
    ‘The fire
should
scare them away,’ he said, ‘but better get a few bows and spears ready, just in case, eh?’
    The slinker! He was hoping that this would put us all off Tall Tree Valley for good.
    Actually, even though I’d felt scared at first, I didn’t think the snow would really harm us. Even back in Circle Valley it happened occasionally that snow fell, and sometimes it even settled for a waking or two in forest on slopes of Blue Mountains or Peckham Hills. I guessed it would be the same here. It wasn’t going to be fun, but we wouldn’t freeze. We had a huge pile of wood to burn and keep us warm till the snow had passed, and we had a fence round us, and I’d never heard of any animal that would come close to a big fire.
    ‘Trouble with Tall Tree Valley,’ John said, ‘is that it’s still in Dark. It’s not really so different from that place up there where we saw the giant slinker: just a little warm patch in middle of Snowy Dark. We won’t
really
get away from Dark until we’re right across and down the other side.’
    If he’d said that a waking earlier, we’d have all been mad at him, but now, our shelters buried and leopards wailing on the slopes, I could see people listening to him and thinking and taking it in, and I could see them remembering all the things that they didn’t like about small, cold, lonely Tall Tree Valley, the things that people like me had been trying to push away with our cheerful chatter about how easy it was to find bucks, or how nice the bloody starflowers tasted.
    Huddled up all wet and cold with a buckskin over my head to keep the snow off my hair, I thought about what it would
really
be like to stay forever under these lonely high trees, and deal with snows like this every couple of periods.
    ‘Yeah, you’ve got a point, John,’ I said. ‘Tall Tree Valley just doesn’t feel like a place where people are meant to live.’
    Mehmet laughed angrily.
    ‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, what
is
this? People lived on Earth in places where it snowed for wombs on end, Gela. Didn’t you know that? And as for you, John, what is your problem? You
know
this snow won’t last, and you know quite well we could manage it easy easy if we put our minds to it, with bigger fires and better shelters and thicker wraps. So what is it you’re trying to do? Are you
determined
to do for us all?’
    I’d never liked Mehmet much, but I had to admit he was learning. He used just to moan at everything John did without offering another plan of his own, but now for the first time he was proposing something that could actually work. We
could
stay in Tall Tree. We
could
build stronger shelters. His hands were shaking and his voice was wobbly, but finally Mehmet was offering an alternative to John.
    He didn’t have long to wait either for someone else to take his side.
    ‘No way am I going back up there where my sister died,’ said Dave Fishcreek. ‘And no way am I going to let you lead me anywhere again, John, not after what happened last time.’
    His voice was shaking too. I’d tried a few times to point out to Dave and his brother Johnny that nobody made us go over to John from Family, and nobody forced us to follow John up onto Dark. I’d tried to point out that none of us could have have known that there was such a thing as snow leopards, and that John’s quick thinking had at least saved the rest of us from what happened to Suzie. I’d even tried reminding them Suzie was my friend, and that I loved her and grieved for her too, but she wasn’t the sort of person that would want them bitter bitter like this. But they’d never been willing to hear what I said.
    Johnny backed up