‘We could make it to that whitelantern just there,’ Gerry whispered. ‘It couldn’t run that fast.’
Both of us were watching that dark shadow moving through the trees, each of us slowly turning round and round so as to always be facing it. (We must have looked weird, standing there side by side and turning round together.) I glanced quickly at the tree Gerry was talking about and I saw he was right. We could easily make it, just so long as we didn’t trip up on something while we ran. Of course the leopard would stop circling as soon as it saw us make a move. It would stop circling and attack, but if we chose our moment right we could be over at the tree and pulling ourselves up into the safety of its branches before it reached us. And then all we’d have to do is yell and wait and pretty soon Old Roger and David and Fox and all the rest would arrive hollering with their spears and bows and arrows, and the leopard would disappear back into forest. Grownups would tell us off for not staying in Cold Path Valley but we’d have a good story to tell, so they wouldn’t really mind, specially if we spiced it up a little bit: the leopard’s jaws snapping at our feet as we swung up into the branches, its cold eyes peering up at us . . . all that stuff that people always put in to make things seem more exciting than they really were.
But then again, I thought, a story like that might be fine and good but it wouldn’t reflect on us specially, would it? People would enjoy the story for a waking or two but it wouldn’t make them think better of Gerry and me. We’d only have done what anyone would have done: spot a leopard, look for a tree, run.
‘You run if you want,’ I whispered — both of us were still slowly turning and turning round on the spot so as to be facing that dark dark creature circling round us — ‘you run.’
‘What? You . . .’
But Gerry was too scared to stand and argue and so he ran, belting as fast as he could go across the clear space to the tree.
Well, I saw the leopard stop. I saw it turn. I saw its eyes flicker as it steadied itself to sprint towards him.
‘Here,’ I yelled. ‘Over here!’
It turned its head back to look at me. Gerry scrambled into the lower branches of the tree and began to climb up to the top. The leopard crept slowly forwards in my direction and then stopped and watched me. Now that the beast was still, the spots down its sides stopped moving backwards and just flickered where they were like real starflowers do. Beneath them its skin was black black. Not black like black hair, not black like the feathers on a starbird, not black like a charred bit of wood. None of those are really black. But a leopard’s skin has no fur or hair or feathers or scales. It doesn’t catch the light. It doesn’t have contours. It doesn’t have different shades in it. It’s black black like sky behind Starry Swirl. It’s black black like a hole that goes right through to the bottom of everything, like Hole-in-Sky.
I felt like crying, I felt like yelling out that I’d made a mistake and I wanted the game to stop. I wished I’d just run like Gerry had done, like every other kid would have done, and every grownup too, unless they were in a whole gang of hunters and they had strong spears with proper blackglass heads. All I had was a kid’s buck-hunting spear, with a shaft made from a redlantern sucker and a lousy spike off a spiketree shoved onto the end of it and glued there with boiled-down sap.
But there was no point in crying or yelling. There wasn’t even any point in being scared. It wasn’t as if I could tell the leopard I wanted to give up and not play any more, was it, like a kid playing hide and seek? It wasn’t as if the leopard was going to say ‘Fair enough then, mate, game over’. I’d made my choice and now I was stuck with it.
So I got myself in a good position and I readied my spear and I watched the leopard, waiting for its move. And I stopped having feelings. There was no point in feelings just then, so I made up my mind not to feel anything at all. I was quite good at that.
‘Help!’ Gerry began to holler from the treetop. ‘Gela’s sake, come and help us! It’s a bloody leopard here! It’s a big big leopard and it’s going to eat John!’
‘Shut up, Gerry, you idiot,’ I hissed. ‘You break my concentration and I bloody will get eaten.’
The leopard watched me. A leopard’s eyes are round and flat and big as the palm of your hand, and they don’t move in the leopard’s head like our eyes do. They don’t turn from side to side. But when you’re up as close as I was, you can see that inside the eye there are things moving, little glints that shift and glitter. And it’s like you’re looking into the thoughts in its black head, like you can actually see them. You can see them, but you can’t understand them. You can only see they’re there.
The leopard began to sing.
Looking straight at my eyes with those blank glittery discs, it opened its mouth and out came that sweet sad slow song that leopards sing, in that sweet sad voice that they have, that voice that sounded just like a woman’s. Everyone had heard it of course: that lonely ooooo-eeeee-aaaaa from far out in forest that sounded so human that you just couldn’t help thinking it was human in some way. Everyone had woken up in middle of a sleep and heard it out there. And everyone had thought to themselves, Gela’s heart, I am glad glad I’m here in Family with people all around me. And then they’d listened out for the friendly familiar sounds of other groups in Family with different wakings: folk cooking meat and scraping skins, folk building shelters with branches and bark, folk hacking at trees with their stone axes, folk chatting and laughing and arguing and shouting things to one another.
And that sweet sound of other people awake and busy, that gentle sound, it made the leopard off in forest seem far away, like another whole world, much too far away to think or worry about. It was just an animal after all, just an animal out there beyond the fence, hunting its prey in its own funny way, no different from a bat really, or a tree fox, or a tubeslinker. And so they sighed and rolled over, and got themselves comfortable among their sleeping skins and got themselves cosy and ready to go back to sleep. And it was almost cosier for them now than it was before, hearing that lonely leopard out there when they were safe and warm inside the fence, just like it was cosy cosy hearing rain on the bark roof of your shelter when you were dry and warm inside.
But for me all this wasn’t happening out there beyond a fence. The leopard was here and I was here too. And it was singing not to some stonebuck or hopper it had cornered, but to me. It was singing me a lullaby, singing a lament for long ago, singing a song of love, a slowly fading song, slowly fading away, sinking back, peacefully fading back and back into the distance, fading and fading and fading until it was far away, not here at all any more, but lost and forgotten . . .
And suddenly the beast was coming right at me, hurtling across the few yards of space that lay between us, its jaws open wide wide, its eyes glinting, its head down ready to kill, while its peaceful song lagged and faded behind it, just like its spots. I pulled myself out of the dream. I lifted my spear. I waited for my moment, knowing that I’d only get one shot at this, only one chance to get it right. I lifted my spear, and I readied it, and I told myself to hold steady and wait. Not yet . . . Not yet . . . Not yet . . .
Now!
Michael’s names, that next moment felt good! I got it just right. I shoved my spear into that leopard’s mouth and it went right down its big hot throat.