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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