thick foliage it was a good place to hide, and there was a spring at the bottom where you could drink.
He and Mother clambered down. It was only the second time he’d touched the ground in many days. They lapped at the spring. Mother found some mushrooms growing from a broken root. That would fill their bellies, but on a day when they had found no meat they would go hungry tonight. Me could tell Mother was still angry, in the hard, jerky way she broke up the mushrooms.
They were already clambering back up into the branches when Old turned up, moving stiffly and cautiously. Me looked down on him as he splashed water into his mouth with his good hand, and picked at what was left of the mushrooms. Mother snarled softly and spat a bit of mushroom at him, but she did not drive him away.
The three sat in the tree’s branches, silent. The sun dropped, and its light shone through the leaves, showing their fine veins and filling the canopy with a green light that dappled on the tree bark. Me held out his hand. Tiny discs formed on his palm, where the sun’s light peeked through the leaves. In the back of his head curiosity stirred. How did the discs get there? But the light faded, and soon there were no more discs on his hand, no more shadows.
Moving slowly, the three of them piled up dead leaves at the root of a fat branch, and lay down together, wriggling, trying to get comfortable. Mother was in the middle of the three. She was the strongest and so took the safest place, shielded by the bodies of the others.
As Me lay down, his belly to her back, her hard buttocks pushed into his groin and he felt his penis grow long. But he was hungry and would not have wished to rut, even if it had been someone other than Mother, who rutted with nobody. He turned away and relieved his hardness with a few strong tugs.
Then he closed his eyes, his back pressed against Mother’s, and tried to sleep, ignoring the hunger that gnawed at his stomach.
The Leafy Boys lived almost silently. They hunted, fought, pissed, shit, rutted, slept, and died, but they didn’t talk.
And they had no names for themselves. Me thought of himself as just that: Me, the centre of the world-forest. ‘Old’ had earned his label in Me’s head because he was a little older than the others. Few survived beyond two, three, four years after your body learned to rut; you grew too heavy, too stiff for the work of climbing, and you fell, or you were done in by the grounders. Old knew this. You could see the fear in his eyes when he woke in the morning.
As for ‘Mother’, she had once got a baby growing in her belly.
The Leafy Boys didn’t keep babies. They kept their numbers up by snatching grounder children. No Leafy girl had ever survived getting a baby in her belly - none but Mother. As the pregnancy developed she had hunted as hard as anybody else, until her belly was too big for her to move, and she had begun to starve because nobody would help her.
In the end, when the bloody water had gushed from between her legs, the others had driven her off with fists and sticks. Her clumsiness, her stink and her blood traces would make it impossible for them to hunt. Even the grounders might be able to smell her. So she had gone off alone, clambering through the canopy clumsily, her pain obvious. Me thought she would fall, and that would be that, and he would never see her again.
Some days later she came back, with her belly slack but empty. Again the others tried to drive Mother away, for she smelled strange, and had a bleakness in her eyes that scared everybody. But she had fought for her place. One had died, opposing her.
Since then Mother had hunted and fought as hard and skilfully as ever. But she would let no boy rut with her.
A few days after her return, Me, fascinated by this new, savage Mother, had followed the trail of drying blood she had left through the canopy. The little body he had found lodged in the crook of a branch had already been discovered by the birds, and it had no eyes, no tongue, and its tiny fingers had been pecked off. A kind of