Dark Eden

were off they were too stiff to be stretched over the end and glued on again, so they just got thrown away. I remembered playing with one of those thrown-away boat ends when I was a little kid. It was hard but it was brittle too: not hard and brittle in the way that blackglass was, because you could bend it a little bit, but if you bent it too far it would snap.
    ‘Harry’s dick,’ I muttered. ‘That’s no good.’
    You didn’t want something brittle on the bottom of someone’s foot, did you? I walked up and down a bit, watching my feet. I could see that my feet bent and moved as I walked to fit the ground. It would be uncomfortable walking on something that didn’t bend like that, and anyway a thing that didn’t bend would surely snap after a while. I remembered how the hard bit at the bottom of the Boots was hard
and
bendy, which was exactly what was needed. But the hard bit of Boots was made of plastic, which came from under the ground on Earth. What could I use that would be like that?
    I wondered about using buckfoot glue instead of redlantern sap, because buckfoot glue isn’t quite so brittle, which is why they used it on the ends of the best spears to hold the gutstring bindings in place: it didn’t crack away from the blackglass in the way that redlantern glue would do, if the spear hit something hard like a tree. But buckfoot glue isn’t so easy to get, because you have to melt a lot of hard bucks’ toes to get even a little bit of glue, whereas to get redlantern sap all you needed to do was look for dribbles of dried sap down the sides of trees, or hack a little hole in the side of a tree and let it run out. (Tom’s neck, I realized,
whatever
kind of glue I used, I’d need to make a pit to melt it in, like the one that Jeffo had down by Dixon Stream.) Yes, and even buckfoot glue was a bit brittle, and even good spears did fall apart.
    I got up and paced around my little camp. I was thinking thinking. The fug had lifted and there was a dip straight after it. Sky over Circle Valley was opening up to Starry Swirl, birds were cheeping and screeching, bats were pouring down the hillside in flocks, but I hardly noticed the change coming on at all, just threw a woollybuck wrap over my shoulders to keep warm without really thinking about it. I’d got a set of chess pieces that Redlantern had given me – the dark pieces were blackglass and the white made of dry spiketree wood – and I’d marked out a board for myself on the dirt. I squatted down and played against myself for a few moves, then jumped up again and began to pace around, thinking thinking.
    I thought about those scraps of buckskin that lay around when people had been cutting out shapes, and how after a while they became dry and hard, and I remembered how you could make them soft and bendy again by wetting them, or by rubbing grease into them. I wondered if you could mix grease with glue to make something that was hard
and
bendy like the plastic at the bottom of the Boots.
    ‘I need a glue pit. I need a load of redlantern sap. I need some buckfeet. I need some more skins. I need some grease.’
    That was ten twenty wakings’ work for me right there, just getting all that stuff together.
    ‘I’ll dig a pit first,’ I decided. ‘Make a deep pit, line it with clay, and dig a fire trench round it in a circle.’
    Then I thought maybe I should look for another buck first. That way I’d get skins, grease, feet and something to eat.
    It suddenly struck me that there was a dip going on, and that Starry Swirl was shining down from most of sky. I’d been so busy thinking that I hadn’t noticed before that moment that the air was growing colder.
    ‘Yeah, another buck,’ I went on, ‘that makes sense. There’ll be woollybucks coming down now in the dip. I’ll go down into Cold Path Valley and look for them.’
    I went to get my spears, the good spear that Redlantern group had given me, and a spare. It was strange. Now I’d paused from all that thinking thinking, I remembered something else that I hadn’t noticed at the time. It was a sound I’d heard when I was down in forest getting in some starflowers: a drum and horns that started loud and faded, the sound of a funeral. And then I remembered hearing the hollowbranch horns two three other times too: two short blasts and a long. Family had been calling back wanderers. I’d let it all go past me. I’d shrugged it off. I’d not even wondered who it was that had died, or who was