Dark Eden

I went down to wake Jane to take over from me, I passed by the buckling’s cave to see what had happened. Jeff wasn’t lying outside on his skin any more so I guessed he must have gone back to sleep with Gerry like he normally did, and I looked over the fence to see what had happened to the buck. The little animal wasn’t dead. It was lying asleep on the ground with its headlantern softly glowing. But the big surprise was Jeff. He was in there too, lying there with it, with one arm draped over its woolly back, just like it was Gerry, just like him and Gerry usually lay together on their sleeping skins.
    Two brothers on a skin was one thing, though. A woollybuck and a human being was something else. A little clawfoot boy and a creature with flat glinting eyes that never shut, lying down together! Well, it just seemed so weird
weird
that I had to get John just to show him. I was so amazed amazed, it was almost like I needed John to tell me that what I saw was really there.
    ‘Looks like he’s got his horse then,’ John whispered.
    ‘I’d honestly never never have thought such a thing could happen,’ I whispered back to him. ‘Mind you, I’d never have thought that someone would destroy Circle of Stones either or break up Family into two pieces.’
    I put my arm round John’s waist, feeling sort of proud of what he’d managed to make happen, admiring the strength that made it possible. But he didn’t respond. He had never once reached out for me, this bloke I’d given up my Family for, not once since that time when me and Jeff and Gerry first came over.
    But at least now I had some good friends with me apart from him and weird Jeff and empty Gerry.
    ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said after a time, ‘it’s a good job we hid our stuff when we did. They only got a few old stonebuck skins, and none of the good woollyskins at all. We need every bit of woollyskin we can get.’
    Then we heard voices coming up from below.
    ‘John? Tina? Gerry?’
    It was three more kids come from Family to join us, three Fishcreek kids, a sister and brothers: Suzie, Johnny and Dave. They were friends of mine too, specially little Suzie with her clever sharp tongue.

    That little buck, it might have shut up for a few hours, but that wasn’t the end of the noise. It woke up a bit later, found Jeff lying beside it and began to scream and thresh about as much as ever. He tried to calm it down even though it was scratching and kicking him, but in the end he had to scramble out over the fence and let it do what it wanted, which was to go on yelling and kicking away in its fence, on and off, for waking after sleeping after waking.
    Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek! Eeeeeek!
    ‘Gela’s tits!’ said Suzie Fishcreek. ‘Can’t we put it out of its misery and eat it? It’d be doing
everyone
a favour.’
    But of course John wasn’t having that, and nor was Jeff, though he was covered in cuts and bruises that the creature had given him with its hard claws and its bony head. John had kids go down to the pool to fetch back fresh wavyweed for it, and fill up its bowl with water. He had more kids go and find fruit. But it didn’t eat a thing. It sipped a bit of water and that was all, and you could see it getting thinner and weaker.
    ‘Face it, Jeff, it’s going to die anyway,’ said Mehmet Batwing. ‘Why not eat it while there’s still a bit of meat left on it?’
    But he may as well have been talking to a stone.

    Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
    I woke up to the sound two three wakings after Dixon Blueside and David’s attack. It was one of the times when the buckling was quiet and a lot of us had gone to sleep. I was lying in the cave, with John on his own sleeping skin on the far side of it.
    Not
now
, I thought, not
another
bloody Strornry! And then of course I remembered – and we all remembered, I suppose – that we weren’t in Family. The hollowbranch horn was coming from far away, from a place where we didn’t belong any more, and the meeting wasn’t for us but for them.
    And it was funny because we always hated Strornries and Any Virsries, and we always groaned and moaned about having to go, but now that we couldn’t go to Strornry, we sort of missed it. It felt sad to be left out.
    ‘What do you reckon they’re talking about back there?’ I asked John, when I saw that he’d been woken too. ‘What are they deciding?’
    ‘That’s easy,’ he said, his frowning face all blotchy with the different colours of the glowing