‘Harry’s dick,’ he said, ‘I so want to do that.’
Then he glanced guiltily at his little brother.
‘You’ll have to tell mum,’ he said. ‘Tell her I love her and that, and that I’ll be alright.’
Jeff looked up at him with his big naked eyes.
‘But I’m coming too.’
Probably me and Gerry could have done the walk in one long long waking, but with his little brother hobbling along with us, we took three wakings and had to stop every hour to let him rest. Towards the end of each waking, we carried him between us, Jeff holding on with an arm round each of our necks, or me or Gerry would take a turn carrying him on our backs.
We didn’t have any proper hunting stuff, no bags or string or bows or anything, only the simple spiketip spears we’d had with us when we went to Stoop and Bella’s funeral, so all we could get to eat were a few bits of fruit and stumpcandy and one grey old groundrat. (It had made a tunnel into an ant’s nest, and I got Gerry to dig with his hands on the opposite side to where it had gone in until it panicked and scuttled back out of its hole, all covered in flashing red ants. Then I did for it with my spear.) We couldn’t even cook the rat properly, only scorch it in a hollow in a spiketree, like hunters do when they don’t want to take fire with them on a trip.
Most of the time the fug stayed down. Sometimes it moved away a bit, and we could see twenty thirty yards of space under the trees. Sometimes it was like we were stuck in a tiny world a few yards wide, with nothing in it but us and a few trees and the odd starflower, and nothing beyond but white shining fug. And then it was sticky and hot, and it was hard hard to walk and carry Jeff.
Once, we heard the hollowbranch horns back in the camp, like the sound of another world: parp parp paaaaarp, parp parp paaaaarp. Two short one long: it was the special sound for getting wanderers to return, when there wasn’t a Strornry or an Any Virsry. They were ordering the three of us to come back. We heard it again at the end of that waking when we were trying to get some sleep. And a couple of times we heard hunters in forest around us, talking and grumbling as they looked for us.
‘Bloody newhairs. Why can’t we just let them go?’
‘Leopards might have done for them already for all we know.’
But we kept still and quiet and waited, and they passed on.
Third waking, the fug lifted and, quite unusually, there was a dip again straight away. Starry Swirl was bright in a black black sky, the air was cold and sharp, and ahead of us we saw the lights of forest rising up into Peckham Hills, the great black shadow of Snowy Dark looming up against the stars behind them.
‘Do you two realize what we’ve done?’ I said. ‘Have you actually got it through your heads? We’ve left behind our mums and our sisters and our brothers. We’ve left our friends and our aunties and our uncles, maybe for good.’
I stopped and looked back into forest we’d come through, though all there was to see was branches and lanterns and starflowers and flutterbyes.
‘And we’ve left the warm fires in our groups,’ I said, ‘and the old blokes playing chess, and the kids kicking footballs, and the grownups acting out the old stories like Hitler and Jesus and Angela’s Ring and The Big Row, and boats fishing out on Great Pool, and one-legged Jeffo boiling up redlantern glue, down there by Dixon Stream. We’ve left behind Family, maybe forever. Think of that. Maybe we’ll never lie in our shelters again and hear other groups getting up and coming home. Maybe we’ll never eat with our groupmates again around the fire.’
Jeff stopped. His twisted feet were all cut up with walking and, even now the dip had come and the air was cool, his face was still pouring with sweat. It was from pain as much as anything, I reckoned, but there was a bit of fever in there too.
He stood there looking round, taking it all in. Starry Swirl shone down above us, so bright bright that it gave a faint light of its own on the branches and the forest floor, over and above the light from the flowers. All round us birds were squawking and squeaking and peeping and pooting like they do when a fug ends, and flutterbyes were everywhere, and bats were coming down from the hills in big flocks, swooping and diving to catch the feast. And it was like Starry Swirl had called them all out of their hiding places, like Starry Swirl ruled over us all.
‘We’re here!’ he said. ‘This is happening. We really are here!’
‘You’re a nutter, aren’t you, Jeff?’ I said, and I swiped him across the head, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to show he was annoying me. ‘Why do you have to keep saying that all the time? Don’t you know how weird it sounds?’
He shrugged and rubbed his head.
‘I say it to remind myself,’ he said, and started to hobble forward again. ‘Otherwise I’d forget.’
On we went with our slow slow walk. Two three hours later we came to Neck of Cold Path Valley, where Cold Path Stream comes out between two spurs of the mountains into Circle Valley.
Gerry and me were supporting Jeff between us, but now Gerry released himself from Jeff’s arm and began to run ahead, leading the way to the bottom of left hand spur of Cold Path Neck.
‘John!’ he called out. ‘Hey John! John! It’s me. It’s Gerry. It’s Gerry and Tina and Jeff!’
Tom’s dick, Gerry,’ I told him, ‘come back here and help me with Jeff. I can’t carry him up there all by myself.’
20
John Redlantern
‘It really wouldn’t be hard to make wraps that could keep our bodies and arms and legs warm up there,’ I said to myself.
Everyone knew you could wrap up in woollybuck skins, even in a deep deep dip, and they’d keep you warm, but you can’t keep loose skins from slipping and coming off if you’re walking. So I just needed to find a way of fixing them on around people’s arms and legs and bodies so they held tight and didn’t slip. Skins can be cut and sewed together with wavyweed string or dried gut, after all, and old pictures on trees round Circle Clearing showed Tommy and Angela in wraps that must have been cut just like that because they fitted tightly round them.
I scratched some shapes on a bit of bark. You could cut two T-shaped bits of skin for the front and back of the body, I figured out, and then sew them together, leaving a hole at the top for the head. Or you could cut two square shapes, sew them up with holes left for arms and legs, and then make separate tubes for arms. And to keep heads warm you could make something like those masks that grownups sometimes used when they acted out animal stories to kids: a skin wrap with little holes for eyes and mouth. You could even sew it onto the neck hole of a bodywrap to make things extra warm.
The hard thing, though, was figuring out how to make wraps for feet. You couldn’t just sew skins together round feet because they’d get soaking wet in the snow. And anyway, walking on them would wear them down and pull them apart. So you’d need to make them so they’d keep the water out and, at the same time, you’d need to make them extra strong and hard on the bottom.
The water part wasn’t such a problem, I thought. When people made lids to go on the end of storage logs, they rubbed them all over with buckfat. It was smelly smelly, but if it rained, the water just ran off. They did the same with the ends of boats, smearing buckfat on the hardened skins to keep water from getting into the glue.