Dark Eden

then they’d dry its guts for string, and clean its bones for diggers and hooks and knives and spearheads (bone is better than tree spikes, though not as good as blackglass). And of course someone or other would eat its eyes: someone who was getting older and beginning to be scared of darkness coming, because people said a leopard’s eyes kept the blindness back, even though they tasted foul. The rest of a leopard’s meat was
bitter
bitter, enough to make you sick, so when Redlantern had taken the bones and skin and guts and everything else useful off that leopard, they’d have to take the meat itself back out of Family again and dump it a good distance off for the tree foxes and starbirds to eat up.
    As to the big woollybuck that we’d done for at about the same time John and Gerry met the leopard, well, like I said, any other time people would have been pretty excited about that too. It would be good eating for many wakings, after all. It had a good big skin that would make a lot of wraps, feet you could melt down for a glue that was as good as boiled sap, and teeth you could use for seedgrinders (the best kind, which didn’t leave grit in the flour like stone seedgrinders do). Most times we could all have expected a bit of praise for getting it, and a few questions about who had done what in the hunt, but this time no one cared. Redlantern just settled down without any fuss at all to skin it, and cut off the tasty lantern on its head, and slice up its body into the Redlantern group portion and the portion that we Spiketrees would take back for our share. (One leg for us, five for them: that had been the deal.) But, all the time they were stripping down the buck, they were talking talking about the leopard whose useless meat was hanging in the tree above them.
    ‘How did you do it, John?’
    ‘Weren’t you scared?’
    ‘What did it feel like?’
    ‘Well done, our John,’ said Bella, the Redlantern group leader, who’d just come back from a meeting right over in Starflower. ‘Well done, our John. This will do us good at the next Any Virsry, my hunter boy. This will be to the credit of Redlantern among all the other groups.’
    She was a clever woman, wiry and always a little bit weary-looking, who people from right across Family came to with problems and arguments. Lots of people said she was the best group leader in whole Family. She worked away waking after waking, not a bit like our lazy old Liz Spiketree, keeping things going, sorting things out, holding all kinds of boring stuff in her head that most people couldn’t be bothered to think about at all.
    And John was close close to her, so I’d heard, though I’d heard other, weirder, things as well.

    Then Lucy Lu spoke up.
    ‘The shadow of John’s grandmother was in that leopard,’ she told everyone in her sing-song voice, as if there could be no doubt about it at all, if you only could see the world through her special special eyes. ‘She wanted him to kill the leopard that she was trapped inside of and release her back to Starry Swirl.’
    She never liked it when someone else was getting too much attention. She always wanted to make herself the one who knew best about whatever was going on.
    ‘I thought you said the Shadow People lived on the far side of Snowy Dark,’ John muttered.
    I don’t think Lucy Lu heard him, but it made me laugh, and John glanced round at me and smiled.
    ‘And she’s at peace now,’ cried Lucy Lu, ‘she’s at peace. And she won’t ever have to . . .’
    But then a London boy called Mike came running over from Circle Clearing.
    ‘Hey, where’s John? Oldest want to see him. Oldest have heard about the leopard.’
    Poor John. I could see he wasn’t going to get any time to himself for some while yet, so I drank down my drink, and picked up some of the meat to take back to Spiketree.
    ‘Never mind, John,’ I told him, before I headed off. ‘It’ll blow over in one two wakings, and then maybe we’ll meet up Deep Pool, yes?’

3

John Redlantern

    And so we hauled that bloody old leopard down from the tree again and off we went, virtually all forty-odd of Redlantern group, with more joining in from other groups as we passed through them. People who’d normally be sleeping came out of shelters to look at us. Even people in boats on Long Pool waved as we went past.
    ‘It’s my cousin!’ Gerry kept calling out. ‘Only fifteen years old and he killed a big leopard. I saw him do it.’
    He was pleased