John was interesting. I mean he looked nice, and I fancied him in that way, but what fascinated me most was the way he behaved. All that hunting trip he was trying to be different, trying not to be the same as all the other newhair guys. He went right up that icy ridge. He annoyed Old Roger and David by questioning the True Story. He stayed still and quiet while Gerry was trying to get laughs with his cold feet. Yes, and I'd given him that oyster, and he'd been pleased, but he didn't make a thing out of it like others boys would. He didn't make a big thing about how he and I were going to have a slip. And now, while the rest of us were hunting bucks, he'd done for a leopard all by himself, which no one ever did, not unless they were cornered and had no choice. And his cousin Gerry was telling everyone that John did have a choice. He had plenty of time to run up a tree, but he'd decided to stay on the ground and try his luck.
So why had he done it? I could just about imagine some silly boy doing a thing like that for a dare, or doing it because his friends said he was a wimp, but John wouldn't go for a dare, and no one thought he was a wimp. He'd done it for some other reason. I hadn't figured out what it was, but I could see that John was like a good chess player: he didn't just do what seemed right at one moment, he thought ahead. He thought about where he was trying to get to, four five moves on.
Well, I was a bit like that too. I knew when to bide my time. So I didn't ask John why he did for the leopard, however much I wanted to know, and I didn't make a big fuss of him like most of the others did, and for most of the walk I fell behind him, leaving him to talk to the ones who wanted to go over the story of the leopard, over and over and over again. But I smiled to myself as we walked back to Lava Blob and then to Family, because I was looking forward to figuring him out.
Family was in eight groups, all bunched up together among the big old rocks that stuck up out of the ground between Greatpool and Longpool and up towards Deep Pool. Each group had its own space with bark shelters and a fireplace where embers were always set glowing. (It could take half a waking to get a new fire going with twigs or blackglass sparks, so no one liked to let a fire go out.) The outer edge of Family was formed by the pools or by rocks, or, when there wasn't any natural sort of barrier, by fences made by piling up branches and rocks to keep out leopards and other big animals. First group inside the fence on Peckhamside was Batwing, so that's the bit of the fence we came to first.
Old Roger Redlantern and big dumb Met dragged away the branches that made the Batwing gateway.
'Leopard kill!' Old Roger hollered out. 'Jade's boy killed a bloody leopard!'
'John did for it,' yelled Gerry excitedly, 'my cousin John!'
Lately the grownups in most of the groups had decided we needed more food-trees in Family to help with our problem of not enough to eat. They'd decided we'd have to get rid of trees whose fruits were no good as food, like redlanterns. And when we'd set out six wakings before, Batwing had been busy chopping down a big redlantern tree, and they'd been at it all the time we'd been away, hacking away at that tree with stone axes for four wakings. They'd finally managed to pull it down with ropes maybe two three hours before we got there, and when we came in through the fence, there was the big tree lying on the ground with bits of broken axes strewn around it. (Someone would need to go over to Blue Hills soon for more blackglass.) The ground was still warm and sticky with sap.
Some little kid had got himself in the wrong place when the hot hot sap sprayed out. He'd been badly burnt. Burnt burnt. If he lived he'd have the scars forever. And now he was yelling and yelling in a shelter, and his mum sobbing by his side. Everything was spoiled for him and her, everything wrecked, by one stupid moment. But the rest of Batwing were pleased pleased with their work. They were walking round that great big fallen thing, and whacking at it with sticks and talking about what a bugger it'd been to get down, and how much bark they'd get off it, and how much wood. And the kids were looking forward to eating the stumpcandy. And everyone was trying not to notice the screaming kid in the shelter.
'Boy killed a leopard!' Old Roger boomed out again. 'Young newhair. Jade's boy John.'
John and Gerry were carrying the dead thing tied onto two branches. I was walking behind them, with ugly old David and handsome shallow Fox. Four others were carrying the big woollybuck that four of us had cornered and done for about the same time as John got the leopard. A lot of eating that buck was going to give, and a lot of skin and bones too to make wraps and tools with, and normally everyone would have been impressed, but now all they were interested in was the leopard. They came running over to touch that weird black skin that was so smooth smooth that it was almost like touching nothing at all. They wanted to look into its dead dead eyes. They wanted to feel the ridges down its sides where the starflower spots had glittered and flowed when it was alive.
'Look at the big black teeth on it,' the Batwings said, reaching out to touch.
'Careful with them,' said Old Roger, though a leopard's teeth aren't exactly fragile. 'They belong to Redlantern, don't forget. We don't want good knives damaged.'
'I saw him kill it,' Gerry kept saying over and over. 'I was up in a tree and I saw it! John could have climbed a tree too but no, that's not my cousin John. He faced it all by himself with an ordinary kid's buck-spear. Imagine that! Just an ordinary spear with a spiketree tip.'
And Gerry looked around at the impressed Batwings, and the people from other groups who'd started to appear: Fishcreek, Spiketree, Brooklyn. He was thrilled, because no one had ever been so interested in what he had to say. (He wasn't a boy that was particularly funny or clever or interesting. He didn't really even have opinions of his own. I'd hardly even noticed him until now.)
'And he killed it cleanly in one go,' Gerry told them all. 'One single stab.'
'Well, he wouldn't be here to tell about it if he hadn't, would he?' said a Batwing boy about mine and John's age. 'It's not like a leopard's going to stand there and let you have a second go.'
The boy was called Mehmet. He was named, like a lot of people were, for Mehmet Haribey, who was one of the Three Companions. But, though the True Story said that Mehmet Haribey was friendly and kind, Mehmet Batwing didn't look all that friendly. He had a narrow clever face and a little pointy yellow beard, and he was a sarky bugger who liked to find fault with people.
Well, I can be pretty sarky myself when I want to be, and I can deal with sarky people, no trouble, but Gerry didn't know how to handle them at all. I saw him look at Mehmet and frown, but he really couldn't work out what exactly Mehmet was getting at, so he shrugged and carried on.
'A bloody great leopard,' he yelled out again excitedly, turning away from Mehmet. 'John says I can share the hearts. And it's fully grown, not just a little one. It sang at him and everything. Sang like a woman, even when it was running towards him. You should have heard it. You should have heard. Like a lovely gentle woman it was, even when it was running at him with its jaws wide open. Fully grown it is. Have you ever seen such a big one? Biggest one ever, I'd say. John says I can have one of its hearts, because I was there too when the leopard came.'
We passed on through the group and into Redlantern group area, which came before Spiketree. And Redlanterns got out some fruit beer and passed it round in dried whitefruit shells for all us to drink and celebrate the double kill.
'John, you idiot,' said John's mother Jade, with that smile of hers that was supposed to send men crazy. 'Why couldn't you climb a bloody tree like any normal person?'
I looked at her and wondered why men couldn't see the emptiness inside her. It was like she was acting being a person, she was moving her pretty body around to make it seem alive, but inside she was lost lost.
'Jade, Jade,' said her sister Sue, laughing. 'Your only son kills a leopard by himself and that's all you can say?'
Sue Redlantern was Gerry's mum and she was a batface, like David, and like my own sister Jane. She was as ugly ugly as John's mum was beautiful, but she was kind and giving and everyone knew it, not only in Redlantern but across whole of our side of Family.
'He's a bloody fool,' said Jade.
I looked at John. His face was still still, but Gerry was upset on his behalf.
'Your son John is brilliant brilliant,' he told Jade hotly. 'He's bloody brilliant. How many kids of twenty wombtimes have ever ...?'
'You should say years,' said Old Roger. 'You should say fifteen years, not twenty wombtimes. You know what Oldest say: the world doesn't come from a woman's belly.'
'How many kids of fifteen years,' Gerry said, 'have ever done for a leopard on their own?'
'He is a brave boy,' said Roger, 'even if he is rude to his elders.'
'He's a bloody lucky boy,' said sour David, pursing his ugly batlips that split open right up into where his nose ought to be.
Little kids were crowding round with toy spears cut from whitelantern twigs.
'How did you kill it, John? What was it like?'
There weren't only kids from Redlantern around us now, but from my group Spiketree and from Brooklyn and even from London and Blueside, right across the other side of Family. Grownups had come over too.
'Right down the throat, I hear,' said an old Fishcreek guy called Tom. He was another batface and he had clawfeet too, poor bugger, so he couldn't ever have been a hunter. But he was clever with making things out of wood and stone – spears, saws, axes, knives, boats – and he liked to talk about hunting. He liked to show that he knew about it.
'That's the best way, of course,' he said. 'A good clean kill. But it's far from easy.'
'Too damn right,' Gerry said. 'It's hard hard. John only had a ...'
'It's not that hard,' John interrupted. 'It just seems hard because it's dangerous. It's like balancing on a branch at the top of a tree. Really, when you think about it, that's no harder than balancing on a branch near the ground, which anyone can do. The only difference is that you're done for if you don't get it right, and that makes it seem harder.'
I smiled. I liked what John had said, and I liked that he didn't say it to pretend to be modest, but because he was annoyed with the smallness of Family that got so excited about a little thing like someone killing one lousy animal. But Gerry looked at him in dismay. Why was John cross that people were making a fuss of him? Why didn't he like it that everyone said he was great? Poor Gerry, who no one noticed much at all, he just couldn't figure it out.
'John only had a second to get it right,' he repeated. 'Too early or too late and he'd have been done for.'
After they'd cut out its two big hearts, grownups tied wavyweed ropes round the leopard's front legs and hauled it up into the meeting tree in middle of Redlantern group for everyone to see. They'd take its skin off later, and pull out its long black teeth and claws for knives, and then they'd dry its guts for string, and clean its bones for diggers and hooks and knives and spearheads (bone is better than tree spikes, though not as good as blackglass). And of course someone or other would eat its eyes: someone who was getting older and beginning to be scared of darkness coming, because people said a leopard's eyes kept the blindness back, even though they tasted foul. The rest of a leopard's meat was bitter bitter, enough to make you sick, so when Redlantern had taken the bones and skin and guts and everything else useful off that leopard, they'd have to take the meat itself back out of Family again and dump it a good distance off for the tree foxes and starbirds to eat up.
As to the big woollybuck that we'd done for at about the same time John and Gerry met the leopard, well, like I said, any other time people would have been pretty excited about that too. It would be good eating for many wakings, after all. It had a good big skin that would make a lot of wraps, feet you could melt down for a glue that was as good as boiled sap, and teeth you could use for seedgrinders (the best kind, which didn't leave grit in the flour like stone seedgrinders do). Most times we could all have expected a bit of praise for getting it, and a few questions about who had done what in the hunt, but this time no one cared. Redlantern just settled down without any fuss at all to skin it, and cut off the tasty lantern on its head, and slice up its body into the Redlantern group portion and the portion that we Spiketrees would take back for our share. (One leg for us, five for them: that had been the deal.) But, all the time they were stripping down the buck, they were talking talking about the leopard whose useless meat was hanging in the tree above them.
'How did you do it, John?'
'Weren't you scared?'
'What did it feel like?'
'Well done, our John,' said Bella, the Redlantern group leader, who'd just come back from a meeting right over in Starflower. 'Well done, our John. This will do us good at the next Any Virsry, my hunter boy. This will be to the credit of Redlantern among all the other groups.'
She was a clever woman, wiry and always a little bit weary-looking, who people from right across Family came to with problems and arguments. Lots of people said she was the best group leader in whole Family. She worked away waking after waking, not a bit like our lazy old Liz Spiketree, keeping things going, sorting things out, holding all kinds of boring stuff in her head that most people couldn't be bothered to think about at all.
And John was close close to her, so I'd heard, though I'd heard other, weirder, things as well.
Then Lucy Lu spoke up.
'The shadow of John's grandmother was in that leopard,' she told everyone in her sing-song voice, as if there could be no doubt about it at all, if you only could see the world through her special special eyes. 'She wanted him to kill the leopard that she was trapped inside of and release her back to Starry Swirl.'
She never liked it when someone else was getting too much attention. She always wanted to make herself the one who knew best about whatever was going on.
'I thought you said the Shadow People lived on the far side of Snowy Dark,' John muttered.
I don't think Lucy Lu heard him, but it made me laugh, and John glanced round at me and smiled.
'And she's at peace now,' cried Lucy Lu, 'she's at peace. And she won't ever have to ...'
But then a London boy called Mike came running over from Circle Clearing.
'Hey, where's John? Oldest want to see him. Oldest have heard about the leopard.'
Poor John. I could see he wasn't going to get any time to himself for some while yet, so I drank down my drink, and picked up some of the meat to take back to Spiketree.
'Never mind, John,' I told him, before I headed off. 'It'll blow over in one two wakings, and then maybe we'll meet up Deep Pool, yes?'
