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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?’

3

     

John Redlantern
     
    And so we hauled that bloody old leopard down from the tree again and off we went, virtually all forty-odd of Redlantern group, with more joining in from other groups as we passed through them. People who’d normally be sleeping came out of shelters to look at us. Even people in boats on Long Pool waved as we went past.
    ‘It’s my cousin!’ Gerry kept calling out. ‘Only fifteen years old and he killed a big leopard. I saw him do it.’
    He was pleased pleased about the glory I was getting. He was smiling smiling and kept looking round at me to check that I was smiling too.
    I didn’t want to disappoint him, and I did my best to look pleased, but truth was I was getting tired tired of it, and fed up with this silly little world we lived in, where one boy doing for one animal could be the most exciting thing that happened for wakings and wakings. I mean, okay I took a risk, but it wasn’t that big a risk really, not if you kept your nerve and concentrated on what you had to do. It wasn’t such a small target, after all, a leopard’s gaping mouth.
    You’re all of you hiding up in trees like Gerry did, I said in my head to all those friendly smiling people, and that’s the trouble with bloody Family. You eat and you drink and you slip and you quarrel and you have a laugh, but you don’t really think about where you’re trying to get to or what you want to become. And when trouble comes, you just scramble up trees and wait for the leopard to go away and then afterwards giggle and prattle on for wakings and wakings about how big and scary it was and how it nearly bit off your toes, and how so-and-so chucked a bit of bark at it and whatshisname called out a rude name. Gela’s tits! Just look at you!
    And the thing was, the meat was starting to run out in Circle Valley. It was no good just hiding up a tree and giggling. Something was going to have to happen or a waking would come in the end when people in Family would