Dark Eden

and laid it down for the buckling in the cave that the two of them had fenced off for a horse.

25

Tina Spiketree

    Dix went off for some hot embers from one of our back-up fire holes and got our main fire going again. He felt badly that he’d not been there when David Redlantern’s lot arrived, and he kept apologizing to us all. Personally, I reckoned it was lucky that he
hadn’t
been there. If he hadn’t come running down the hill when David’s lot weren’t expecting it, he wouldn’t have been scary enough. He was a nice boy, a lovely boy, and nicely built too, but he really wasn’t that big or scary. If he’d been there all along, maybe they’d never have let themselves be driven away.
    We took John’s leopard tooth knife and hacked off a leg from the little buckling’s dead mum, then we cooked it up with whitelantern fruit that the others had gathered while we’d been away. Janny cried a bit. She had some nasty bruises too from where the men had grabbed her. Gela and Clare cried a bit as well, and that made Gela’s brother Dix start up again about how sorry he was for not being there.
    ‘Tom’s dick and Harry’s, Dix,’ I told him, ‘will you give it a bloody rest? You weren’t on lookout or anything, were you? So you didn’t do
anything
wrong going up the hill looking for stuff to eat, no more than we did anything wrong looking for bucks.’
    ‘Lookout?’ Dix said. ‘Why don’t I go on lookout now? It was supposed to be Janny now but I reckon she could do with a rest. I’ll do the first watch and let you lot get some sleep.’
    (Of course we didn’t have groups of people sleeping and waking at different times in our camp like in Family. We were just one group and we all slept and woke up more or less together.)
    ‘Yeah, alright,’ I said. ‘Harry can be lookout with you, can’t you, Harry? I mean there’s no way you’re going to calm down, is there, Harry mate, for several hours at least? I reckon you could do with walking up and down a bit on lookout, to work off some of that tension.’
    Pretty soon all the rest of us except for Jeff lay down and tried to rest. Not that it was easy to rest with everything that had happened going through our heads and that bloody little buckling screaming and screaming in its cave.
    After a couple of hours Dix and Harry came to get me and John to take over their watch. John went down the hill to keep an eye on the path up to our camp from forest. I went up the hill, above the caves, to look out over the main valley, and to make sure no one came sneaking down from above.
    I was so tired tired, what with the hunt and everything, that I had to keep moving around to stop myself from falling off to sleep. Even so I
did
nod off for a bit, right there on my feet. It wasn’t for long, I don’t think, but when I woke up I could tell straight off that there was something different. Something had changed.
    Well, then I
really
woke up. It’s a bad bad lookout that goes to sleep and misses some new thing until after it’s already started happening. Like the saying goes, ‘It’s too late to yell leopard if it’s already inside the fence.’
    But what
was
it that was different? I listened and listened until I felt as if my ears were sticking out of my head on stalks like a buck’s feelers. The world sounded different in some way and yet when I listened to each separate sound on its own, I could only hear ordinary things, things you heard all the time: bird calls and the little gabbling cries of bats, streams trickling over stones as they came down from Snowy Dark,
hmmph
,
hmmph
,
hmmph
from nearby trees, the stready
hmmmmm
of forest . . . Just ordinary familiar Eden things, things that were there all the time, like the lanterns shining away below.
    ‘John?’ I called softly. ‘John?’
    I wanted to ask him if he’d noticed anything or if he could figure out what was different, but he was too far off to hear me and I didn’t want to shout too loudly. And anyway just then I finally realized what the difference was. It
wasn’t
a new sound at all. It was a sound missing. The buckling had gone quiet. It had finally stopped its screaming. Maybe it’s died, I thought, though I can’t say I cared that much. My main thought was thank Gela it wasn’t some new attack that I’d missed! And I looked forward to going back down to my sleeping skin and getting off to sleep without that bloody noise going on and on.
    All the same, when my watch was done and