Dark Eden

where to start!
    ‘I’m
not
slipping with him, you idiot. He’s a little kid, for Gela’s sake! His feet were hurting, I came down here with him to help him wash them, and we fell asleep . . . And another thing,
I’m
a kid too. I’m a newhair, like you are, not a woman. And
another
thing, what do you mean
your new family
? A new family? Yours?’
    He opened his mouth to answer but I hadn’t finished.
    ‘Yes, and what business is it of yours who I slip with anyway? You didn’t ask me when you went with Martha London or with . . .’
    I was going to say Bella, but I stopped in time.
    ‘We should have new rules,’ he said. ‘New family rules about who slips with who. It was different on Earth. It hasn’t always been like how it is now in Family.’
    ‘We can talk about it,’ I said.
    He nodded.
    ‘And as to building up a new family,’ he said, ‘well, we’ve got to, haven’t we? We can’t go back to the old one.’
    He relaxed a bit and squatted down.
    ‘You shouldn’t sleep out here like this. There were three leopards near here only a couple of wakings past.’
    ‘Yeah. We heard them back in Family. David said they’d probably done for you.’
    ‘He should be so lucky.’
    He examined the tip of his blackglass spear the way grownup hunters do, checking to see that the edge was still good.
    ‘We need to build up a new family and we need to find out how to get across Snowy Dark and find a new place for ourselves,’ he said.
    I thought about this.
    ‘Well, we can probably find a few more kids who’ll come and join us. We could go back through forest, meet up with newhairs when they’re out alone, see if we can talk them into coming over.’
    He nodded.
    ‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. There’ll be enough of them wanting to, I’m sure. Trouble is, the more that come over, the sooner we’re going to make Council so angry that they’ll want to stamp us out.’
    ‘How could they, though? In the end, how could they?’
    ‘They could kill us.’
    ‘Kill? I know people would
like
to kill us, but no one’s ever done for another person, have they, never even once on Eden.’
    ‘Things are different now,’ said John, the one who’d
made
things different whether we wanted him to or not. ‘Everything’s different and always will be from now on.’
    Back up at the caves Gerry had woken up.
    ‘Jeff?’ he called out. ‘Tina? John?’
    ‘Down here!’ John called back.
    He turned back to me.
    ‘I’ve started to think about how to cross Dark,’ he told me. ‘We need to begin building up a big supply of skins, and buckfeet. We won’t keep them all here, though. We’ll hide them in different places. People are going to come over here from Family sooner or later looking for us, and we don’t want them taking all our stuff. We’ll need a lot of skins and we’ll need to find ways of covering ourselves like they did on Earth, so as to keep warm. It can’t be that hard. The hardest bit is covering up our feet in a way that will keep out the snow. I’ve been thinking about how to make footwraps, with buckgrease to keep out the water and something hard on the bottom to stop them wearing through.’
    He broke off, looking down at Jeff.
    ‘
He
won’t be able to manage it, though, will he? I wish you hadn’t brought him. It won’t work with clawfeet.’
    Jeff opened his big innocent eyes.
    ‘What about a horse?’ he said.
    He must have been awake for a little while.
    John snorted.
    ‘Horse? What are you talking about?’
    ‘Back on Earth they had animals called horses, remember? They were animals that could carry them anywhere they wanted to go.’
    ‘Yes, Jeff,’ I said, like a grownup talking to an annoying little child, ‘we know that, dear, but this isn’t Earth, is it? There aren’t horses in Eden.’
    Jeff sat up.
    ‘I don’t think horses were a special kind of animal,’ he said. ‘I think they took baby animals and then raised them up so as to make them
into
horses. We could use woollybucks.’
    ‘Yes, Jeff,’ John said, ‘but the Earth animals weren’t like Eden ones, were they? They had eyes like our eyes, eyes that you could look into and see what they were feeling. They
had
feelings. They had one heart like us, and red blood, and four limbs. They were almost
like
people. You could understand them. You could teach them things.’
    We none of us said anything for a bit after that. It was funny. I’d just assumed at first that it was Jeff being crazy as