Dark Eden

turning round and round so as to always be facing it. (We must have looked weird, standing there side by side and turning round together.) I glanced quickly at the tree Gerry was talking about and I saw he was right. We could easily make it, just so long as we didn’t trip up on something while we ran. Of course the leopard would stop circling as soon as it saw us make a move. It would stop circling and attack, but if we chose our moment right we could be over at the tree and pulling ourselves up into the safety of its branches before it reached us. And then all we’d have to do is yell and wait and pretty soon Old Roger and David and Fox and all the rest would arrive hollering with their spears and bows and arrows, and the leopard would disappear back into forest. Grownups would tell us off for not staying in Cold Path Valley but we’d have a good story to tell, so they wouldn’t really mind, specially if we spiced it up a little bit: the leopard’s jaws snapping at our feet as we swung up into the branches, its cold eyes peering up at us . . . all that stuff that people always put in to make things seem more exciting than they really were.
    But then again, I thought, a story like that might be fine and good but it wouldn’t reflect on
us
specially, would it? People would enjoy the story for a waking or two but it wouldn’t make them think better of Gerry and me. We’d only have done what anyone would have done: spot a leopard, look for a tree, run.
    ‘You run if you want,’ I whispered – both of us were still slowly turning and turning round on the spot so as to be facing that dark dark creature circling round us – ‘you run.’
    ‘What? You . . .’
    But Gerry was too scared to stand and argue and so he ran, belting as fast as he could go across the clear space to the tree.
    Well, I saw the leopard stop. I saw it turn. I saw its eyes flicker as it steadied itself to sprint towards him.
    ‘Here,’ I yelled. ‘Over here!’
    It turned its head back to look at me. Gerry scrambled into the lower branches of the tree and began to climb up to the top. The leopard crept slowly forwards in my direction and then stopped and watched me. Now that the beast was still, the spots down its sides stopped moving backwards and just flickered where they were like real starflowers do. Beneath them its skin was
black
black. Not black like black hair, not black like the feathers on a starbird, not black like a charred bit of wood. None of those are
really
black. But a leopard’s skin has no fur or hair or feathers or scales. It doesn’t catch the light. It doesn’t have contours. It doesn’t have different shades in it. It’s black black like sky behind Starry Swirl. It’s black black like a hole that goes right through to the bottom of everything, like Hole-in-Sky.
    I felt like crying, I felt like yelling out that I’d made a mistake and I wanted the game to stop. I wished I’d just run like Gerry had done, like every other kid would have done, and every grownup too, unless they were in a whole gang of hunters and they had strong spears with proper blackglass heads. All I had was a kid’s buck-hunting spear, with a shaft made from a redlantern sucker and a lousy spike off a spiketree shoved onto the end of it and glued there with boiled-down sap.
    But there was no point in crying or yelling. There wasn’t even any point in being scared. It wasn’t as if I could tell the leopard I wanted to give up and not play any more, was it, like a kid playing hide and seek? It wasn’t as if the leopard was going to say ‘Fair enough then, mate, game over’. I’d made my choice and now I was stuck with it.
    So I got myself in a good position and I readied my spear and I watched the leopard, waiting for its move. And I stopped having feelings. There was no point in feelings just then, so I made up my mind not to feel anything at all. I was quite good at that.
    ‘Help!’ Gerry began to holler from the treetop. ‘Gela’s sake, come and help us! It’s a bloody leopard here! It’s a big big leopard and it’s going to eat John!’
    ‘Shut up, Gerry, you idiot,’ I hissed. ‘You break my concentration and I bloody
will
get eaten.’
    The leopard watched me. A leopard’s eyes are round and flat and big as the palm of your hand, and they don’t move in the leopard’s head like our eyes do. They don’t turn from side to side. But when you’re up as close as I was, you can see that inside the eye