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 and her clever little sister Clare.
We’d left six of them back by the caves, but Dix had gone up the hill with a bow and some arrows, looking for monkeys, so there were only five there when they came from Family: David Redlantern and big stupid Met, who used to be friends with Gerry and me, and fat old Dixon Blueside and three other newhair boys. They’d kicked out our fire, taken whatever skins and meat they could find and tried to drag Janny back with them to Family and Redlantern group.
‘Harry went crazy,’ said Tina’s friend Gela in her deep voice. ‘You should have seen that brother of yours, Tina. He just went at those men with a big club. He went straight at them, bellowing and yelling, so the two who’d got hold of Janny had to let go and back off because they could see he’d mash them like a slinker.’
‘So then Janny ran back to us,’ Clare went on. She was a small girl, quite quiet normally, who’d make a little sharp comment and then back off again, like a groundcreeper into its hole, but she was shaking shaking now, too scared and upset about what had happened to worry about anything else. ‘So then we all grabbed sticks and spears and started screaming and yelling, all together, like we do when a leopard gets too near back in Family. Only it wasn’t really like that, because it wasn’t one leopard and a whole big lot of us, it was six of them, all blokes and two of them grownup men, and only five of us. Our Dix – Dix Brooklyn – he was up the hill somewhere, looking for bats or something, so aside from little Jeff, Harry was the only bloke we had. I’ll tell you, we were scared scared.’
‘Yeah,’ Gela said. ‘Harry worried them for a short time when he came at them with his club, so we followed that up as best we could by screaming and waving spears, but pretty soon they worked out it was still them that had the advantage. You could see them starting to figure that out. You could see the fear fading and the ugly grins starting to appear again on their faces. They were just beginning to come at us again when Dix came charging down the hill, yelling and waving his spear.’
‘I reckon they thought it was all of you lot coming back,’ Clare said, ‘because they took one look at him, grabbed the skins and stuff that they’d nicked, and ran. I don’t think they realized it was just one bloke on his own. But little Jeff was standing off to the side and one of those Blueside boys shoved him over on the ground and kicked him before he ran off . . .’
‘What?’ Gerry cried out once. ‘Is he . . .?’
‘It’s okay, Gerry,’ Clare told him quickly. ‘Jeff’s not badly hurt or anything, and . . .’
She broke off, because for the first time she noticed the woollybuck with the wrap over its head.
‘Michael’s names! What is that?’
‘It’s a woollybuck,’ Gerry said. ‘It’s a live woollybuck. Hold its rope for a bit, will you, Clare? I’d better run up and see Jeff.’
It was strange. All this time the buckling had been shrieking and screaming – for its mum, I suppose, though she was dead and dangling from a branch right beside it – but neither Clare or Gela had even noticed it until that moment, just like we hadn’t noticed them screaming and yelling up ahead. Something that I’d begun to notice was that people often don’t see things they aren’t expecting to be there, even if it’s right in front of their faces. It was a useful thing to know. It meant there were always more possibilities in a situation than people realized.
But now Tina’s brother Harry came thumping down the path. He was all red and sweaty, his breathing was heavy and his eyes were big and rolling around in his head. My heart sank. I’d seen him like this back in Family once twice.
‘Gela’s tits,’ muttered Tina. ‘He’ll stay that way for hours and hours.’
‘Hey Tina and John!’ shouted Harry in his baby way. ‘Harry drove them away with his club, Harry did. They tried to take Janny, Tina, but I drove them away.’
‘That’s good Harry,’ soothed Tina. ‘Well done! That’s good good.’
Gerry was already dabbing at Jeff with a wet buckskin when we got up to the caves. My little cousin had some bruised ribs and a black eye, but that didn’t stop him jumping up and hobbling over as soon as he saw the little bu
ckling. From then on he was like its new mum. He never left it. He even pulled his own sleeping skin out of the cave where he slept with Gerry 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 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 tho
ught, 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 rocklanterns. ‘They’re talking about us. They’re trying to decide what to do about us.’
He shrugged.
‘They’ll spend a waking talking,’ John said, ‘and then, if they decide to come over, they’ll spend at least a waking and a sleep getting here. So I reckon we needn’t worry about them for a bit.’
Paaaaarp! Paaaarp! Paaaarp!
‘But what then?’ I asked. ‘We know that David’s going to say we should all be spiked up like Jesus. And, okay, we know Caroline and Council won’t agree to anything like that. But what will they decide? After all, even Caroline said when they chucked you out that it was okay to hunt you like an animal. And how much longer will she be in charge anyway? How long before David calls all the shots?’
John stood up.
‘A while yet, I should have thought. And no one has ever done for another human being, not since the Beginning. Even David is scared to be the one that changes that. After all he’s got to live among our mums and aunties and uncles and groupmates.’
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