The Ritual (18 page)

At the top of the ravine, Dom and Phil sat on a boulder each and planted their boots into the wet moss between the rocks. They panted beside Luke and stared at their feet without seeing them. Both of their waterproof coats were undone and their hoods were down. Hats were stuffed into trouser pockets. Each red face was coated with a film of grease and old dirt and shone with a sheen of sweat.

Gravity thickened around Luke. Responsibility like a tangible weight made the rock under his buttocks harden. He’d never led anything in his life before and they had all been reliant on Hutch for the entire hike. From deep inside his belly, anger flared up through him, revived him. What had H been thinking, taking these two off piste like this? The entire trip had been far too ambitious for Dom and Phil, even without plunging them into unknown terrain, hoping for a short cut.

Luke took three mouthfuls of water from his bottle. It tasted of rubber and of the forest around them: the cloying of damp wood, rotting leaves and cold air. He detested it. He smelled of it too. They were almost part of it now. Just a few bright colours of the manmade fibres they wore marked them out as any different to the thoughtless, relentless decay of season and nature. It would be so easy now to just sink to the ground and get recycled, to be eaten or to rot away. The endlessness of it, the sheer size of the land and their total insignificance within it nearly shut his mind down.

He spread the map across his thighs before the other two noticed the tremors of panic that must have been visible in his face and in his fingers. He searched the green and brown shapes on the map, but could not comprehend much of what he was looking at because his head was so padded with fatigue and exhaustion. The map indicated it was a national park, that they were in a collective of forest and marsh, but failed to indicate any individual contour or noticeable feature they could identify to orientate from. He was feeling listless, and apathetic too now; it didn’t abet concentration. What did that mean? Hypothermia. Not possible. They were wet and became cold when they stopped moving, but were not soaked to the skin or shivering. Not yet.

‘Where are we?’ Dom shuffled sideways to an adjoining stone.

How the hell did he know? He could not even understand how much ground they had covered that morning. It felt like they had stumbled for miles, but rough terrain outdoors in a wilderness played tricks on the mind. He and Hutch had been lost together once before, six years ago, while walking back from a beach on an island in the Swedish archipelago, wearing only T-shirts and shorts. The island was barely five miles long and two miles across, but somehow they’d turned themselves around and become scratched all over, eventually arriving back at the exact point they had left two hours earlier. Impossible, as they had been convinced they had moved due east in a straight trajectory. At least here they had a compass, but it still didn’t supply the answer to where they actually were, or how far they were moving. Never as far as it seemed; he had enough experience to know that much.

‘Problem is,’ Luke said, avoiding Dom’s eyes as he spoke, ‘it’s hard to know how much ground we have covered since we first came in, over the best part of three days now.’

Dom sighed and shook his head. It felt like an accusation and made Luke suddenly defensive. ‘But we are heading in the right direction.’

‘But how long is it going to take? We should have come out of here the day before yesterday, and been on the other side of the forest. This bit is not that thick on the map.’ Dom spread his dirty fingers across the paper, his eyes frantically searching the colours and shapes and dotted lines, hoping they might suddenly provide a clue as to where they were now sitting.

But it was hardly only a ‘bit’ or patch of forest. In some areas the forest was at least fifty kilometres deep and from what they had seen of it, mostly impenetrable or unmanaged virgin forest. It had been Hutch’s intention to just cut through a far westerly band, where the forest was at its thinnest. No more than ten kilometres deep according to the map. But Luke wondered if they had blundered off the original trajectory Hutch envisaged them taking, while following the track to the old church. They’d also been repeatedly turned about by the terrain and its impenetrable foliage; had walked due west, due east, north west and south west at various times. They’d spent most of the previous day walking west, and even north west, according to the compass, instead of moving south west before angling directly south and down to what Hutch was sure was the lower edge of the forest on the map, with the river running beneath it. That had been the plan. But now H wasn’t with them, Luke had turned them due south that morning so they wouldn’t overshoot the narrowest section of forest. Which was fine if they were positioned where he’d guessed they were. But if they had strayed too far west the previous day and entered the adjacent thicker belt of forest they were now looking at thirty kilometres of hard terrain and forest so old and dark, the hours of sunlight barely lightened the earth. If they had continued to walk west, eventually, they would have emerged in Norway. Similar endgame situation again if they hadn’t corrected far enough in a south-westerly direction the day before, and the due south course he had set that morning pitched them far into a broader area of eastern wilderness. It would take about three days’ walking to get through the bigger and more densely forested areas on either side of the narrow band they hoped they were inside, but only if they were fit; for him, if he were alone, that would mean another two, possibly three nights, without food. But for the other two, who were injured … Luke felt sick and lightheaded.

‘I mean, what if we get over this fucking hole, and then there’s another one, just like it, on the other side?’

He’d not even thought of that, but now Dom had voiced the concern, Luke believed it to be entirely possible. Patterns of terrain often repeated themselves, or sometimes they were just single anomalies. There were marshes all over the map on either side of the narrow band of forest. Like the woodland functioned as a funnel; a trap, if you were foolish enough to take a short cut through it, hoping to avoid the bordering wetlands. The very thought seemed to drain the last of his strength as he imagined a bird’s-eye view of a topography revealing long deep ravines parallel to this one, a rib cage stretching for miles. It would be the end of them.

Luke made an energy bar vanish in two bites and immediately thought about ripping into a second. The other two were already chewing the end of their second bars, which meant they should each have three left. Hutch’s last four had been divided equally, with one left in reserve that he held on to along with the chocolate bar. To remind the others of the perilous situation he said, ‘I reckon we should eat two more bars tonight, with coffee and loads of sugar in it. We have the gas for another night and morning. That’ll leave one energy bar each in reserve with the chocolate if needs be.’ He didn’t say
tomorrow
, but since they had been forced to sit down and face the gorge, the idea of another night together in the open, with two of them keeping watch with knives drawn while the third slept, had begun to fill his chest with a pressure so terrible he could not swallow or exhale with any ease. But the inference, the threat of another night out here, was implicit in his voice.

Each bar contained 183 calories. With two consumed now, and two eaten later they still would not even scrape 1,000 calories each, and they were still facing hours of extreme exertion ahead, hiking into the cold and wet.

‘Those were my last two,’ Phil said emotionlessly, and looked at the filthy palms of his hands.

Luke stared at Phil’s tousled head and swallowed. ‘Tell me you are joking?’

‘Mate, we’re burning off a lot of fucking calories here,’ Dom snapped. Even this tired and he still had energy for attitude.

‘So what are you going to eat later?’

‘We’ll need that chocolate,’ Dom said, his face stiffening to a challenge.

‘We? You’ve eaten all yours too?’

Dom nodded, without a trace of shame or regret evident in his expression. ‘And I’m still starving.’

Luke turned away and stared across the ravine in silence. He could be across it in twenty minutes, maybe less. The idea excited him. And it was the best possible course of action available after all, he thought, as he resurrected the original strategy he’d discussed with Hutch the night before.

If he dropped both packs and the tent and put everything he had left inside himself into the hike, he could walk steadily until nine before it became too dark to walk any further safely. That would still give him another eight hours unimpeded and unencumbered by this pair. He might even make it out of the forest tonight if he was walking in the right direction. He could leave the others here with the tent, beside a notable feature that would be visible from the air. They had water. No food, but whose fault was that? They would just have to wrap up warm, get into their bags and take it in turns to keep watch, maybe get a fire going.

But if they survived tonight, they’d have to spend another night out here too. Because even if he made it out of the forest later that evening, at least one more day of walking would be necessary to even locate the next minor road or settlement and organize a rescue. Two nights with no food and one of them injured. Would they even get a fire going? They had lighters, but just about everything around them was too wet to burn. This was the fourth day of constant rain or drizzle; it would take hours to get the most serviceable wood together to keep a fire going for any length of time. And the gas would be gone by tomorrow morning.

His thoughts sped from one scenario to another, and then slowed to consider the repercussions of each potential choice. But no matter what he considered and then dismissed, he still knew his own best chance of survival was to strike out alone.

‘So what now? How the fuck do I get across this?’ There was a note of accusation in Dom’s tone of voice.

‘Maybe …’ Luke said quietly.

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe we go back to the original plan.’

‘Original plan? The original plan was to get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible, by the most direct route. Are we not still following the original plan?’

It was the sarcasm. Always the sarcasm. Would it ever end? Hobbling around on his useless knee, criticizing, always complaining. Luke was his only chance of survival and still he was contemptuous. ‘You’re not going to like what I’m about to suggest.’

‘I’ll fucking put money on it, eh Phillers?’

Phil looked bewildered. ‘What?’

‘He’s thinking of taking off. Aren’t you? And just bloody leaving us here.’

‘Look—’

‘I can’t believe you’d even consider it.’

Luke clenched his jaw. ‘If you could walk properly, would you even be here now?’

‘What?’ Dom shook his head in disgust. ‘Well, I never. Though I don’t know why I’m surprised. You take over the map and play Hutch all day. Get us even more lost than we were already. And when we reach this crater, you’re going to just leave us. When we agreed this morning that we would stick together.’

‘You said, Luke. You said,’ Phil blurted out with an urgency that filled Luke’s head with confusion.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘From where I am sitting it fucking is. Every man for himself now is it? Well go on. Fuck off then. Fuck us.’

‘Listen—’

‘I’m sick of listening. First Hutch’s bright ideas that got himself killed, and now yours. And we’re still fucking here. Fucking lost. So fucking lost.’ His voice trailed off into a breathy hopelessness that made Luke feel every tired sinew and fibre cry out within his own body for it all to just stop.
Please God, just let it stop now.

Luke stood up. Dom flinched. Phil’s body tensed. They thought he might hit them. Why? He wasn’t like that. Or was he? And was he just abandoning them because they were slowing him down, or was he really trying to save them all? Maybe Dom was right and he was only trying to rationalize his own selfish desire to survive. In extreme situations self-preservation did take over. Was it time for him to cut the rope, or go down with them too? He didn’t know any more.

He suddenly felt ashamed; visualized himself walking away from these two forlorn figures, sitting beside a half-collapsed tent. Neither of them could even erect one. He and Hutch had put both tents up every night from the beginning of the trip.

Luke pointed down and into the ravine, desperate to displace another confrontation. He glanced at Dom. ‘Can you get across that?’

‘Yes.’

‘For real?’

‘Yes for fucking real.’

‘OK then. Let’s do it.’

Phil rapidly looked at each of them in turn. ‘Safety in numbers, ’ he said, his voice rising to form a question within the statement.

THIRTY-FIVE

‘I can’t go any further.’ Dom stared between his knees, at the ground he had slumped upon. His face was concealed by the hood of his waterproof.

‘Me neither,’ Phil muttered in solidarity.

Luke turned his head from where they lay and looked back up the hill he wanted them to climb. Just the sight of it defeated them. One obstacle too far.

He groaned and removed the rucksacks, first from his chest and then from his back. Aches burned up and down his torso. Stretching upright, his spine cracked with sudden shocks of pain. The worst of the discomfort was deep within his shoulders; without the weight of the rucksacks acting like tourniquets, his muscles were squeezing themselves into brief contractions of agony. What was wrong with his thighs? They were heavy, but trembling uncontrollably. He checked his watch. 4.25 p.m.

Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he stared at the higher ground. The dark fir trees and spruce thinned into the white trunks of silver birches and dwarf willows about the summit of the hillock; one long spruce tree sprouted incongruously from the peak. The high ground was topped with rock, grey with reindeer moss, and could offer a decent vantage point. Maybe he could climb the spruce too, and see over the surrounding ocean of forest. Get a sense of where they were. Be easier to defend too. Smoke from a fire might carry on the breeze. And the hill could be seen from the air.
It had finally come to that.
This had been his thinking.