Read Online The Kin by Peter Dickinson - Free Book Online Page A

men at the feast? Do you speak when they speak?”
    â€œIn three moons I am made a man,” said Suth obstinately.
    This was true and not true. If the strangers hadn’t come and changed everything, then in three moons the Kin would have travelled south to Odutu below the Mountain, and Suth would have spent a night alone on the Mountain above Odutu, and in the morning Bal would have cut the first man-scar into his cheek and told him to make himself a digging stick. After that he would have left the women’s side and sat with the men and listened to their talk. But it would have been tens of moons and three more scars before he would have been allowed to join in.
    â€œAlways the men mock this boy-man. They point fingers. They raise their lip,” said Mosu.
    â€œStones are sharper,” he answered.
    She turned her head away.
    â€œMake a digging stick,” she said.
    â€œMoonhawk is Moonhawk,” he insisted.
    â€œYou say it,” she answered. “Go forage. The girl stays. We talk.”
    He looked at Noli.
    â€œI talk with Mosu,” she said. “Bring Otan to me.”
    As Suth left the camp with Tinu and the small ones, he saw Noli sitting cross-legged, with Otan in her lap, listening while Mosu talked. He felt puzzled and angry. He had just stood up to the old woman and won his point. Moonhawk wasn’t going to be split up. They were keeping together. Only they weren’t, because Noli wasn’t coming to the foraging grounds with them, but was staying behind to talk to Mosu.
    She had to stay. Suth understood that. Mosu was leader of these people. If Noli had tried to refuse, Mosu would have kept her there by force. But Suth guessed Noli actually wanted to stay, he didn’t know why. That was what hurt.
    On the way to the ground rat warren, Suth broke branches from bushes to use in his trap. He had noticed a pile of good flat rocks by the warren, which people must have carried there to use, but they didn’t seem to be marked with anyone’s mark so he took one of those. Ko, of course, wanted to build a trap too, so Suth broke a spare branch into lengths for him, as a father would have done. He showed him how to use them to prop the rock up, so that when a ground rat nibbled the bait a stick would be dislodged, and the rock would fall and kill the rat. It wasn’t easy, and Suth didn’t think either of them would have much luck.
    Meanwhile Tinu and Mana built a trap of their own. All three were baited with seed paste mixed with the crushed leaves of a garri bush, which ground rats were especially fond of. When they’d finished, they marked the traps with the Moonhawk mark and set off for the foraging grounds.
    The foragers weren’t where they’d been yesterday, but he found them easily enough by the noise they were making, down in the thicker scrub. They were hunting for a kind of caterpillar that came out of the ground on the morning after a rain and climbed a bush and hung itself from a thread, to begin the process of turning itself into a moth. Only on the first morning was it good to eat, Sula told Suth. By evening the case it spun around itself had begun to harden, and the flesh inside was too bitter to swallow.
    While the foragers searched they kept up a constant yodelling, passing it to and fro along the line. The men didn’t join in. They just stood guard, striding around at the edge of the group, letting out hoarse shouts and thwacking at the bushes with their digging sticks. Every now and then one of the foragers would bring one of them a caterpillar, pinch off its head and pop the body into the guard’s mouth.
    Ko was delighted by the shouting and thwacking and ran around yelling at the top of his voice until one of the women caught him and brought him back to Suth.
    â€œYou keep him close,” she said scoldingly. “You want a leopard to take him?”
    â€œI thank,” said Suth meekly. He realized that however