Dark Eden

joined in with him happily, laughing and laughing up there on that ridge in Dark, with the wide bright world below, all glittery and fresh and new. No more snow and dark and snow leopards. All of that was behind us. No hungry wakings. No having to eat bats and slinkers because there wasn’t enough buckmeat. A new start for us, a new world, and all the space we could possibly need for generations and generations and generations.
    We started down the mountain. In a couple of hours we were walking by a stream with trees humming all around us, and their lanterns lighting our way, white, blue, pink, yellow. Herds of stonebucks lifted up their heads from the shining starflowers and watched us pass. They didn’t even try to run away.

39

Tina Spiketree

    So now we’d crossed Snowy Dark and found Wide Forest, the wide wide space that John had always insisted would be there. And in some ways life was easy easy, easier than it had ever been back in Circle Valley. There was so much fruit and so many birds and bucks – stonebucks and woollybucks and a new kind of buck we called a widebuck, big like a woollybuck, but with smooth smooth skin – that we could get together the food for a waking in just an hour or two. You didn’t need to have everyone working working all waking long just to get enough to eat, like we used to have to do back in Family. John said we should start School again when our children were a bit bigger, and teach everyone to write and do sums. He said we should use all that extra time to learn things and find out new things, like they did on Earth.
    We found a place to stop, a quarter waking’s walk from bottom of Dark. It was next to a long warm shining pool that bent round like a knee or a letter L, so we called it L-pool. It was full of fish and oysters and ducks. Trees grew round the edge of it and out into it too, waist-deep, and their big bright lanterns hung down over the water, white and green and yellow, giving out a thick sweet scent. The water gave us protection from leopards on two sides, and we quickly made a short fence out of branches near where the two sides of the L joined, so as to make ourselves a little safe triangle. Inside this fence we built a half-circle of shelters, and two big fire holes in middle, deep deep so as to be sure that there’d always be red embers glowing there.
    ‘Right,’ said John, as we sat round the fire inside our newly finished triangle fence. ‘We’re safe from leopards now, so let’s start building a
proper
fence.’
    He wanted to enclose a big big space, big as whole of Family area back in Circle Valley, so that it would give us enough room to grow as big as Family itself, and he wanted us to help him build a huge L-shaped fence so as to make a square with the two whole sides of L-pool.
    ‘But why do we need that, John,’ Gela asked him, in her sensible way, ‘when there are only fourteen of us plus a couple of babies?’
    ‘This is a new family,’ John said. ‘This is a beginning again, free of all the bad things that happened in Old Family. Clean and fresh and new. Without Oldest. Without Circle. Without Council. Without David Redlantern and his crew. Without Any Virsries where only Council can speak.’
    He looked round at us.
    ‘A new family without all those things, yes, but still one that will grow as big and strong as Family itself. Bigger, even. Stronger.’
    Harry jumped up and danced a silly jig. He could tell that John wanted us to be excited about his idea and he was trying in his own way to get us going.
    ‘Harry’s happy! Harry’s happy!’
    I suppose it looked cute when he was a little boy, before I was born, and I guess back then everyone laughed and encouraged him, but it didn’t look cute now, not when he was older than anyone else there. No one joined in and no one laughed.

    And we weren’t so crazy, either, about that ‘fresh and new’ thing of John’s any more. We helped work on his big fence from time to time, to keep him happy and because it wasn’t such a bad idea to stop leopards from coming in too close to the little fence around our shelters, but mostly we just got on with doing the ordinary things we needed to do to keep ourselves going.
    Life was easy in one way, but in another way it had turned out hard. Sometimes I felt lonely lonely. There were so
few
of us. Okay, there was my Dix, and his mate Mike, and my good friend Gela, and my batface sister Jane, and little sharp Clare, and cheerful Janny, who