Dark Eden

of their long bendy snouts. One of them growled softly, and the lanterns on the heads of all three of them started to shine more brightly. Then they began to move off to the left.
    Tina jumped up behind them and ran towards them yelling.
    They turned and ran straight towards me. I kept down low until they were nearly on top of me, then threw the blackglass spear straight at the first one. I got it right in the shoulder, right in deep so I knew it wouldn’t need another spear to finish it, then turned and chucked my second spear at the second buck, the newhair. The spear got it in the face. It didn’t badly injure it, but the creature was scared and turned round again, which meant that Tina, jumping across the stream, could get it smack in the side with one of
her
spears.
    The other buck ran off. We ran up to the two injured ones threshing about on the ground there, and Tina did for them both with her remaining spear. Then she knelt and dipped her fingers in its greeny-black blood.
    Gela’s tits, that was enough meat for two whole groups and there were only four of us here to feed.
    ‘Michael’s names!’ I said laughing. ‘How are we expected to get this lot back to the caves?’
    Tina stood up, licking the blood from her fingers and laughing too. It felt great. It felt, for the first time since I’d been out of Family, like everything might work out well.
    ‘One of us can stay here and guard them to keep off the tree foxes and starbirds. The other can go back to get Gerry. Then we can take them back one at a time. Look at all this meat, look at all this woolly skin! And we’ve only been hunting a couple of hours!’
    ‘Didn’t get a live baby, though,’ I said.
    ‘No. Do you really think that would work?’
    ‘Worth a try, I reckon, like you said. And, think about it, if there had been a baby one here, we
could
have got it, couldn’t we? If one of us had done for its mother the other could have jumped the baby and held it down, and we could have tied its feet with rope so it couldn’t run. Those little bucklings can’t be
that
strong.’
    She bent and ran her fingers through the wool on the big old buck.
    ‘Enough skin here to try and make some warm wraps for us, and even some of those greased footwraps you were talking about.’
    ‘Easily. If it’s enough to keep two big bucks warm, it should do for all of us.’
    ‘Taste the blood,’ she said. ‘You should taste the blood when you make a kill.’
    She got some more on her fingers and offered them to me to lick. All round her mouth was stained dark with buck blood.
    ‘You should see your face,’ I said, laughing as I took the thick sweet stuff.
    ‘You should see
yours
!’
    She reached out to pull me towards her for a kiss.
    And I wanted to kiss her too, but at the moment our lips touched Bella came back into my head. I thought about her tying a wavyweed rope to a branch and round her neck, all alone, all alone in forest, thinking I didn’t care about her. I thought of her testing the rope to make sure it was firm and then getting ready to jump, knowing that in the next second there’d be a horrible scary choking time and then nothing, nothing, nothing ever again.
    I froze up inside. Kissing me must have been like kissing a stone.
    ‘What’s the matter, John?’
    I didn’t tell her. I didn’t like to talk about things like that. I didn’t want people to think things like that were a problem for me.
    ‘We shouldn’t hang about,’ I said, trying to move away in my head from that cold cold stone inside me, which was how it felt to know that Bella was dead, a big icy lump of stone filling me up. ‘We’ve got two dead bucks here, look, and foxes and starbirds will soon want their share. I’ll mind these bucks, and you run back and get Gerry. You won’t need to run all the way. You should be able to call him not far from here, if you just get above the trees a bit.’
    Tina looked at me, and shrugged.
    ‘We need to get some clay,’ I reminded myself out loud, as she walked off. ‘Clay to line the glue pit with.’

23

Tina Spiketree

    Six seven wakings after we did for those bucks, me and Gerry went over Lava Blob way, hoping to meet people from Family. John was busy trying to figure out how to make wraps that could keep a person warm up on Snowy Dark, sitting surrounded by woollybuck skins, and a leopard tooth knife, and string made with dried wavyweed, and more string made of buck sinews and dried buck guts. He’d been