Janny, Lucy, Mehmet, Mike, Dixon, Gela, Clare, Harry, Jane, Tina, Gerry, Jeff and me. There were thirteen of us now, and yet it was only a few few wakings since I’d been all on my own. (We could have done without Harry, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that.) All the new people settled in quickly in their new living place above Valley Neck, chattering and laughing and squeaking and squealing and fooling about, just like newhairs did back in Family. Sometimes I felt a bit left out of all of that, like I did back in Family too, because I’m not often one for squeaking and fooling around. But when I felt that way, I would remind myself who brought them here.
‘They might think they came here to be with Tina or with one another,’ I said to myself. ‘But if it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be one of them here. Not one. They’d all still be in Family, and Circle would still be as it was, and nothing would be different from how it was for wombs and wombs and wombs. And it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to live anywhere else but there, squeezed in around Circle Clearing between Greatpool and Longpool and the rocks.’
It helped to remind myself of that. It helped me with pushing away that cold stone of Bella’s death and pulling myself out from underneath it, and it helped me to remember that I still needed to make things go forward. If I left it to the others, no plans would get made. They’d just eat and sleep and play and slip, until something happened to stop them. They wouldn’t try and figure out in advance what that something would be, or how to get round it when it came.
Well, to be fair, maybe Tina would have done, and perhaps Gela Brooklyn, and maybe even Jeff if he thought anyone would listen to a little clawfoot kid whose new hairs hadn’t even properly started to grow, but none of the others.
We felt another little dip coming on at the end of a waking, and I got seven of us together to miss sleep and go straight over to the bottom of Cold Path to look for woollybucks. We took spears and ropes and I took all the wraps me and Jeff had made, while Gerry and Tina took another two sets of wraps they’d made since with Jeff’s help. The way I arranged it, me and Gerry and Tina would go up the path towards the edge of the ice. Jane, Mehmet, Lucy and Mike, who just had bitswraps and shoulder wraps and bare feet, would wait at the bottom of the path for us to drive bucks down to them.
The four of them laughed at me and Tina and Gerry when we pulled on those stinky wraps, specially when we put on the headwraps that covered up our faces, but they were impressed too, I could see. It was new new: new like nothing in Family had been since before any of us were born. There must have been a time when people figured out how to make blackglass spears and wavyweed rope and how to stick skins to the ends of logs to make boats, but for a long time it had been like we’d forgotten that there was any possibility that things could be different to what they already were.
With our wraps on, looking like some strange new kind of creature, me and Tina and Gerry walked up the path. This wasn’t just a buck hunt to me, it was a first step to getting ourselves right up on Snowy Dark. There’s a faint picture, scratched on a tree near Circle Clearing, called ‘The Astronaut’ made by Tommy or Gela or one of the Three Companions. It’s a man in a strange Sky Wrap that lets him live in places so high up in sky that there’s no air left to breathe. It’s one of the people who found a way of getting outside of Earth. And I felt pretty much like an Astronaut now, walking up the path with Gerry and Tina in those stiff hot fuggy wraps. I felt like an Astronaut taking his first steps up into sky.
And the 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 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 buckling. 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.