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leaving him to talk to the ones who wanted to go over the story of the leopard, over and over and over again. But I smiled to myself as we walked back to Lava Blob and then to Family, because I was looking forward to figuring him out.

     
    Family was in eight groups, all bunched up together among the big old rocks that stuck up out of the ground between Greatpool and Longpool and up towards Deep Pool. Each group had its own space with bark shelters and a fireplace where embers were always set glowing. (It could take half a waking to get a new fire going with twigs or blackglass sparks, so no one liked to let a fire go out.) The outer edge of Family was formed by the pools or by rocks, or, when there wasn’t any natural sort of barrier, by fences made by piling up branches and rocks to keep out leopards and other big animals. First group inside the fence on Peckhamside was Batwing, so that’s the bit of the fence we came to first.
    Old Roger Redlantern and big dumb Met dragged away the branches that made the Batwing gateway.
    ‘Leopard kill!’ Old Roger hollered out. ‘Jade’s boy killed a bloody leopard!’
    ‘John did for it,’ yelled Gerry excitedly, ‘my cousin John!’
    Lately the grownups in most of the groups had decided we needed more food-trees in Family to help with our problem of not enough to eat. They’d decided we’d have to get rid of trees whose fruits were no good as food, like redlanterns. And when we’d set out six wakings before, Batwing had been busy chopping down a big redlantern tree, and they’d been at it all the time we’d been away, hacking away at that tree with stone axes for four wakings. They’d finally managed to pull it down with ropes maybe two three hours before we got there, and when we came in through the fence, there was the big tree lying on the ground with bits of broken axes strewn around it. (Someone would need to go over to Blue Hills soon for more blackglass.) The ground was still warm and sticky with sap.
    Some little kid had got himself in the wrong place when the hot hot sap sprayed out. He’d been badly burnt. Burnt burnt. If he lived he’d have the scars forever. And now he was yelling and yelling in a shelter, and his mum sobbing by his side. Everything was spoiled for him and her, everything wrecked, by one stupid moment. But the rest of Batwing were pleased pleased with their work. They were walking round that great big fallen thing, and whacking at it with sticks and talking about what a bugger it’d been to get down, and how much bark they’d get off it, and how much wood. And the kids were looking forward to eating the stumpcandy. And everyone was trying not to notice the screaming kid in the shelter.
    ‘Boy killed a leopard!’ Old Roger boomed out again. ‘Young newhair. Jade’s boy John.’
    John and Gerry were carrying the dead thing tied onto two branches. I was walking behind them, with ugly old David and handsome shallow Fox. Four others were carrying the big woollybuck that four of us had cornered and done for about the same time as John got the leopard. A lot of eating that buck was going to give, and a lot of skin and bones too to make wraps and tools with, and normally everyone would have been impressed, but now all they were interested in was the leopard. They came running over to touch that weird black skin that was so smooth smooth that it was almost like touching nothing at all. They wanted to look into its dead dead eyes. They wanted to feel the ridges down its sides where the starflower spots had glittered and flowed when it was alive.
    ‘Look at the big black teeth on it,’ the Batwings said, reaching out to touch.
    ‘Careful with them,’ said Old Roger, though a leopard’s teeth aren’t exactly fragile. ‘They belong to Redlantern, don’t forget. We don’t want good knives damaged.’
    ‘I saw him kill it,’ Gerry kept saying over and over. ‘I was up in a tree and I saw it! John could have climbed a tree too but no,