Dark Eden

slow walk. Two three hours later we came to Neck of Cold Path Valley, where Cold Path Stream comes out between two spurs of the mountains into Circle Valley.
    Gerry and me were supporting Jeff between us, but now Gerry released himself from Jeff’s arm and began to run ahead, leading the way to the bottom of left hand spur of Cold Path Neck.
    ‘John!’ he called out. ‘Hey John! John! It’s me. It’s Gerry. It’s Gerry and Tina and Jeff!’
    Tom’s dick, Gerry,’ I told him, ‘come back here and help me with Jeff. I can’t carry him up there all by myself.’

20

John Redlantern

    ‘It really wouldn’t be hard to make wraps that could keep our bodies and arms and legs warm up there,’ I said to myself.
    Everyone knew you could wrap up in woollybuck skins, even in a deep deep dip, and they’d keep you warm, but you can’t keep loose skins from slipping and coming off if you’re walking. So I just needed to find a way of fixing them on around people’s arms and legs and bodies so they held tight and didn’t slip. Skins can be cut and sewed together with wavyweed string or dried gut, after all, and old pictures on trees round Circle Clearing showed Tommy and Angela in wraps that must have been cut just like that because they fitted tightly round them.
    I scratched some shapes on a bit of bark. You could cut two T-shaped bits of skin for the front and back of the body, I figured out, and then sew them together, leaving a hole at the top for the head. Or you could cut two square shapes, sew them up with holes left for arms and legs, and then make separate tubes for arms. And to keep heads warm you could make something like those masks that grownups sometimes used when they acted out animal stories to kids: a skin wrap with little holes for eyes and mouth. You could even sew it onto the neck hole of a bodywrap to make things extra warm.
    The hard thing, though, was figuring out how to make wraps for feet. You couldn’t just sew skins together round feet because they’d get soaking wet in the snow. And anyway, walking on them would wear them down and pull them apart. So you’d need to make them so they’d keep the water out and, at the same time, you’d need to make them extra strong and hard on the bottom.
    The water part wasn’t such a problem, I thought. When people made lids to go on the end of storage logs, they rubbed them all over with buckfat. It was smelly smelly, but if it rained, the water just ran off. They did the same with the ends of boats, smearing buckfat on the hardened skins to keep water from getting into the glue.
    ‘We could use woolly buckskins with the fur inside and the outside greased and greased,’ I said to myself. ‘Or even two layers of greased skins. And as well as sewing the wraps into shape we could make them stronger by wrapping greased string round and round them, like you wind gutstring round the back end of a spearhead to hold it in place on the shaft.’
    But how could we make that hard bit on the bottom? I remembered the Boots that were brought out with the other Mementoes at Any Virsries. Everyone agreed that the tops of them looked like they were made out of some sort of skin (though it wasn’t like buckskin at all) but on the bottom they had a thick flat layer of plastic to make them stronger to walk on. I thought about cutting a shape from bark and fixing it on, but I reckoned bark would crack after a while, or crumble when it got wet and soft from the snow. Then I thought about how old Jeffo made the ends of boats, by covering smooth stonebuck skins with glue made from redlantern sap, and sticking them together in layers, before putting a layer of grease on the outside. When they dried they were hard hard, so you could rap your knuckles on them, just the same as you could rap your knuckles on the log part of the boat.
    ‘Perhaps we could make the footwrap and grease it all over on the top,’ I muttered, ‘but on the bottom stick on layers and layers of buckskin and redlantern glue until it’s as hard hard as the ends of one of Jeffo’s boats, and then cover the glue with more grease.’
    I thought and thought about this. I thought so hard about it that really and truly I forgot all about where I was, or what had happened, or the fact that I was alone. All I cared about was figuring out how to make a hard bottom on a footwrap.
    In my mind I felt the skin ends of a log boat. They were hard hard, but after a time they did come off, and once they