But that was how it was. We walked down beside the stream again and pretty soon tall trees were all around us again, there were lanterns wherever we looked, white and red and blue, and that little crack in the hills had widened out into Cold Path Valley. It was a small place: in an hour you could walk right across it to the narrow little gap in the hills that led back into Circle Valley where we lived.
‘I wonder where the woollybucks go,’ I said. ‘I wonder if there’s another forest they go to beyond the hills.’
‘Another forest?’ snorted Fox. ‘Don’t be daft, John. There couldn’t be anywhere else as big as Circle Valley.’
‘That’s wrong! When Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions first saw Eden, they saw lights all over . . .’
‘Beyond the hills the Shadow People live,’ Lucy Lu interrupted me in a loud slow dreamy voice.
She was a woman with a round pale face and watery eyes who used to go round the other groups in Family and offer to talk to the shadows of their dead in exchange for bits of blackglass and old skins and scraps of food.
‘That’s crap,’ said Tina. ‘There’s no such thing as Shadow People.’
I agreed with her. I’d got no time for things that people saw out of the corner of their eye, or in dreams. Harry’s dick, there were enough real things to look at face on! There were enough things you could put your hands on and hold.
‘You wouldn’t say that if you saw them like I do,’ said Lucy Lu in that dreamy voice, like she was only half in our world and half in a shadow world which only she could see.
‘Some people reckon sky is a huge flat stone,’ Gerry broke in suddenly, ‘and Starry Swirl is rocklanterns growing underneath it, like you get in caves. This big flat stone, it sits up there with its edges on the top of Snowy Dark. Dark is really there to hold it up.’
‘That is really crap,’ said Tina with her throaty laugh. ‘Boy, that really is. And no one else even says it either apart from you, Gerry. You made it up just now. Trying to be different like your hero John.’
‘No I didn’t!’ Gerry laughed.
He was happy to have headed off an argument between me and Lucy Lu and Fox.
‘Of course you did,’ Tina told him. ‘It’s the most half-arsed thing I ever heard.’
‘Yes, and make sure you don’t say that sort of thing in front of Oldest either,’ said Old Roger. ‘They wouldn’t like it. How could Tommy and Gela have come down from Starry Swirl with the Three Companions if it was just rocklanterns on a stone?’
‘So Gerry can’t have his own ideas?’ I said. ‘But Oldest can make up any fairy story they like and then force us all to accept that it’s true?’
‘You watch it, John,’ said David. ‘You bloody watch what you say.’
‘Newhairs!’ complained Old Roger. ‘When I was young we showed respect to our Oldest. We’d never say the True Story was made-up.’
I didn’t really think it was made up. I didn’t doubt that Tommy and Angela and the Three Companions had come down from sky. We had the Mementoes after all, we had the Earth Models, we had old writing and pictures scratched on trees. We had all kinds of reasons for believing it was true. I just didn’t like the way that some people were allowed to take that old story and keep it for themselves and make it say what they wanted it to say.
Pretty soon Old Roger divided us up into pairs and had us spread out across Cold Path Valley, looking for woollybucks. I was in a pair with Gerry. We were sent to the narrow gap called Neck, which went through into Circle Valley proper.
‘Right up to Neck, mind,’ Old Roger said, ‘but not beyond. That way you should spot any bucks that try and run that way from the rest of us.’
We walked over to Neck, and squatted down with our spears to wait for bucks. There was a place above us that I’d visited once twice on the spur of hill that formed the right hand side of Neck as you looked back towards Family, and I pointed it out to Gerry.
‘There are five six good dry caves up there,’ I told him, ‘with a bit of open ground in front of them so you could sit there and look out over forest. And a bit below them there’s a pool, ten twelve foot across, warm warm from spiketree roots.’
Gerry glanced up where I was pointing and shrugged.
‘It would be a good place for Family to live,’ I told him. ‘Much better than where we live now. It’s got everything you need: a pool, caves. It’s handy for woollybucks. Blackglass too, I dare say, if you looked hard enough.’
Gerry laughed.
‘You say weird weird things sometimes, John. What do you mean a good place for Family? Family is a place!’
‘It’s a place, and it’s a bunch of people,’ I said. ‘The people could move, couldn’t they? Or some of them. The people and the place don’t have to be the same thing. Family could move and this would be just the place to move to.’
‘But we’ve got to stay by Circle!’ Gerry protested. ‘Otherwise Earth won’t be able to find us when they come back for us! Come on, John, you . . .’
Then he broke off, and laughed like he’d realized I was joking, but I’d fooled him just for a moment.
I wasn’t sure myself if it was a joke or not.
‘Let’s go out into the big forest,’ I said.
Gerry shrugged. He’d do whatever I wanted. He was one of those that need other people to tell him what to do and what to be.
‘We were supposed to stay in Cold Path Valley,’ he pointed out.
‘Yes, but we’ll just go a little way.’
It was pretty soon after we went through Neck and into Circle Valley forest that we met the leopard.
We were in one of those openings you get in whitelantern forest, where an old group of trees has died and crumbled and no new ones have come up yet from Underworld. All around us were whitelanterns and spiketrees with flowers shining white and blue, with flutterbyes feeding on the lanterns, and starflowers growing beneath the trees. But right here, in this open space, there were only little tiny starflowers growing close to the ground, and Starry Swirl was plain to see high above us, with no branches and lanterns in the way.
I was just kneeling down to get a drink from a stream when I saw it.
‘Look Gerry, there!’ I whispered, scrambling back up to my feet.
‘What?’
A group of starflowers among the trees shone out for a moment and then faded again. And then the same thing happened among another lot of trees over to the left of the first lot, flowers appearing and fading. And then the same again, a bit further on.
‘Gela’s tits!’ Gerry says. ‘Quick! Get up a tree!’
I didn’t move. Another lot of flowers appeared and disappeared. Meanwhile Starry Swirl shone down and flutterbyes fluttered and sparkled, and the trees went hmmph, hmmph, hmmph, and forest went hmmmmmmm, like always.
More flowers lit up and disappeared, and this time we could see the dark shadow of the leopard itself, almost invisible behind those shiny, shimmery starflowers on its skin that slide back towards its tail as it goes forward, so they seem to stay in one place. It was circling round us, like leopards do, circling round and round: pure silent darkness, slipping behind the bright flowers that rippled across its skin.