Dark Eden

wraps pretty much worked! They got a bit wet in places, specially round our feet, so that still needed working on. But even right up there by the ice, our bodies stayed warm warm, and even though our feet got a bit wet, they weren’t cold like they’d have been if our feet had been bare. They weren’t hurting like they did when we came up with Old Roger.
    Five bucks came down from Dark with their headlanterns shining bright bright: four big ones and a little baby one trailing along at the end. We scrambled up the hillside off the path and waited until they’d gone right past us – I reckoned the wraps helped here too, because they made us smell of woollybuck and not of human being – then we crept down behind them, making starbird noises to signal to the others below to be ready for them. The bucks trudged slowly on with us behind them, their headlanterns fading to a soft glow as they left Snowy Dark behind them and got down into the light and warmth of the trees.
    An hour later, near the bottom of the path, we did another starbird cry.
Hoom! Hoom!
    Aaaah! Aaaah!
the others answered.
    We found a place where the path went through a narrow gap in the rocks and hid up above there.
    Aaaah! Aaaah!
the other four called again, and then suddenly they all stopped trying to sound like starbirds and began to yell like excited newhairs so we knew that the bucks must have spotted them and would now be running back towards us again up the path.
    Gerry got the first one with his spiketip spear as it came up to the gap: a good shot straight up and under its neck into its chest. The spearhead went directly into one of its hearts and Gerry was covered in thick black blood.
    Now the other bucks didn’t know what to do. The slopes to the side were stony and steep steep. With six legs each the bucks could still easily climb them, but they couldn’t climb quickly, and they knew it, and that made them hesitate, like they thought there might be another option. And meanwhile we were coming at them from above and below. Two of them did manage to get away up the slope but we did for another of the big ones while it was stumbling on the stones. (Mehmet said the glory of it was his, but it was hard to know for sure who’d got it first, because it had spears sticking out of it all over when it went down.)
    We were
pleased
pleased.
    ‘We’d never have got these bucks if we hadn’t set up over here,’ I told the others later. ‘That was my point to Caroline, remember? In these short dips, bucks would have been down and up again before any one from back in Family could have made it over here.’
    But doing for the grownup bucks was only part of it. The best part, the strangest part, and the thing that none of us had seen or heard of being done before, was that I’d dived onto the baby buck while Gerry was doing for its mother and I’d managed to hold it down on the ground.
    Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!
The little thing was threshing about like crazy, kicking with its clawed feet and squealing and squealing and shrieking enough to make your ears feel like they were going to burst. Its headlantern was flashing flashing flashing, its feelers were waving frantically, and its big round mouth opened wide and closed and opened wide again like it couldn’t get enough air to breathe. It had nearly thrown me off when Tina jumped on it too, and then so did Jane and Mehmet. Lucy and Mike got the rope we’d brought with us and made a knot round its neck, tight but not so tight as to choke it, and another tied round one of its back legs, and I had the idea of taking the wrap off my head and sticking it over the head of the little buck so it couldn’t see. And then Lucy and Mike and Mehmet held it, squealing and pulling and threshing, while me and Tina and Gerry got our own sweltering wraps off. Mine were all ripped open by the buckling’s kicking legs and I had a big bloody gash across my arm, which I hadn’t even noticed in the excitement.
    We took it in turns to carry back the two dead bucks, lashed by the feet to branches, and to drag along the little living one, stumbling over the stones with the wrap over its head. And the creature made such a racket on the way back, shrieking and squealing and scrabbling away with its feet, that we never heard the yelling and shouting of the others back at camp. The first time we knew that something bad had happened back there was when two of the others came running down the rocks: big tall sensible Gela