It happened too fast for her to calculate. A step forward, onto one end of a long piece of dead wood hidden under leaf mould. The other end levered up from the forest floor. Yapping, a ground puppy leapt out from under it: two handfuls of dirty yellow bristle hair; teeth imbedded in it. Red maw, ring of fangs all round it. Tan-Tan screamed, flailed away. The ground puppy bounced off her knee, slashing briefly at her thigh as it went. It ran off into the darkness on all twelve legs.
“Shit. Is what the rass ever make my people name that thing a ‘puppy,’ eh? Blasted thing look like a hair ball with teeth.” Jittery with fright, Tan-Tan knelt to inspect the bite it had given her. A circle of tooth marks in her knee was bleeding slightly. Ground puppy bites could fester. She would ask Chichibud for something to put on it.
This close to the ground, she could see other things scuttling out from where she’d disturbed the piece of dead wood. A handful of red crablike insects. Something else that favoured a bright green leaf with a million tiny legs running, running, running under it. The way its body undulated made Tan-Tan’s stomach writhe in sympathetic motion. It ran up a tall, thin tree, turned sideways, and slid its body under an edge of bark.
She just wanted to be somewhere safe, somewhere familiar, where people looked and spoke like her and she could stand to eat the food. She crouched on the ground like that for a while, breathing, remembering when she was a girl-pickney and she’d had a home.
Her belly growled. Memories weren’t going to fill it. She stood. Balancing on one foot at a time, she took off her alpagat slippers and shook them out: she didn’t feel to have no red-crab thing or million-leg leaf-thing clambering about in her footwear, oui? What had made her think she could come down here wearing only canvas rope slippers? Stupid bitch, said her internal voice. Maybe Chichibud and Benta could bring her back some hiking boots next time they went into a prison colony to trade.
She found a long stick to probe the forest floor with as she walked. She’d learned her lesson, she took her time, only putting her feet down once she was sure there was nothing dangerous where she wanted to step. She found some nice big mushrooms and put them in her carry pouch. Little farther on she spied a weedy halwa tree, small and struggling in the shade of the daddy tree. Her mouth sprung water at the thought of the sweet gizada-smelling fruit. In two-twos she was up in the tree. Nanny was finally smiling on her; there were two small but ripe fruit. On the ground again she cleared a space in the leaf mould. It went down calf-deep and she didn’t want to think about the disgusting things she flushed from it. One of them had looked like a dried sack of bones, oui. She used fallen twigs to build a fire and roasted the halwa fruit. She ate until her belly swelled, baked the mushrooms over the remaining coals. She would have them and the remaining halwa fruit for dinner.
Time to climb back up the daddy tree.
She couldn’t find it. In the engulfing darkness she couldn’t make out any of its trunks. Is which way she had come from? She couldn’t remember. Maybe from over there so? She took a few steps that way, dead leaves crackling underfoot. She tripped over a log. It hadn’t been there before, she was certain. Is not this way she had come from. She turned a next way, peering into the dark in front of her. She walked one hundred paces, two hundred. Still no daddy tree trunk.
“Chichibud,” she whispered. That twist-up vine looping from one jumbie bush to the next; had she passed that before? She couldn’t remember. That hollowed-out trunk? That waist-high fan of glowing purple fungus? Her head was completely turned round. She didn’t know is which way she’d come from or which way to go. She couldn’t stop the whimpering sound coming from her throat. She stumbled off to the left, poking the stick into the ground in front of her as she went. Still nothing didn’t look right. She ducked at a rustling sound in the leaves above her head. She looked up. A dead leaf was falling, falling slowly to the ground to add itself to the mulch on the forest floor. A big leaf. A red leaf. A juicy leaf. The whimper almost managed to turn itself into a little laugh.
“Cho. I too fool-fool. Ain’t is daddy tree branches right there above me so?” The daddy tree was wide as a village and she’d been under it all the time.
She held the lantern high, studied the pattern of the daddy tree branches above her head, the way they rayed inwards. Where the branches met, she’d find one of the daddy tree trunks. It was so simple. She headed in the direction that the branches pointed. When she saw the buttress roots of the main trunk looming out of the darkness she nearly laughed out loud with relief.
Chichibud was there! Lying along one of the buttress roots, hind claws digging into the daddy tree wood, waiting for her. Tan-Tan called out joyfully to her friend.
“I name Kret,” he said. “Tallpeople could never tell we apart.”
Kret. The one who disapproved of her being there. So he could speak creole. Tan-Tan stayed where she was. Kret’s muzzle hung open, sharp douen fangs gleaming in the half-light. He jumped down and came towards her. Tan-Tan grasped her stick firmly in her hand, ready to defend herself.
“Girl, you making enough noise to give the dirt and all headache,” he said. “Is what you doing down here?”
Tan-Tan held out her carry pouch for him to see.
“Is what you have in there?” he asked.
She wasn’t mookoomslav enough to get close to show him. “Mushrooms.”
He tasted the air. “And roast halwa. Like you too good for the blessings of the daddy tree. You coulda find those things growing up there.”
She could have. It wouldn’t have suited, she’d wanted to be by herself. And right now her business was how to get past Kret.
“Benta bring me down here,” she lied. She pointed off somewhere into the blackness. “She over there. She tell me to come here and wait for she.”
Kret looked where she was pointing. He twitched his snout up in a strange way, like a dog would if it were barking. But he was making no noise.
“Liard pickney,” he said. How did he know?
He jumped back onto the buttress root. “Cho. Me ain’t business with disrespectful tallpeople. Play down here if you want, me wouldn’t bawl if mako jumbie take you.” Smoothly as a snake he headed back up to the light.
When she couldn’t see him any longer, she began the climb up herself.
*Poison,* Benta declared when she’d seen what Tan-Tan proposed to eat for dinner. With her beak she flipped the mushrooms out of one of the window holes. Poison.
“Shit.” Tan-Tan blew cool air on her hands where the climb had rubbed the skin off. She could still feel the trembling in her thighs from the ascent back up to the nest. “I can’t eat the way allyou does eat, I can’t move about the daddy tree the way allyou does do it, I can’t even take a piss without it causing somebody some botheration!”
Chichibud said, “We don’t mind. You is guest. You need to give your body and your mind time to heal after what Antonio do to you.”
No, not that. Talk about something else. “But none of the other douen want me here.”
“Old Res say you could stay, so none of them go do nothing, no matter how much them chat. Don’t worry your head about that. The pickney-them just mischievous. Them will tease you, but don’t pay them no mind.”
“And what I go do for food? I sorry too bad, Chichibud, but I can’t eat all the raw egg and live centipede allyou does eat.”
Of all the things to do, Chichibud laughed. “I know. Tallpeople does remove all the life from all their food before they eat it, but them still ain’t satisfy with that. Them have to burn it too, and make it deader than dead. None of we douen understand how allyou could taste anything what you eat after allyou done burning everything to coal. I sorry, darling, but we have to be careful about fire in the daddy tree. We don’t cook plenty up here.”