The Ritual

was stuck; it was tearing the world apart to get out.
    Against his stomach and groin, he felt a nose; as wet as seafood and contracting like a baby’s heart in his navel. It was the worst sensation of all, in there, in the darkness, while
smashed into his seat. Below the nose its mouth worried and busied and dripped. It was seeking something to pinch and tear like tracing paper between quick fingers.
    A last moment of himself, an instinct, or maybe it was a spasm, a twitch, sent from the origins of his own species when they coughed out their last under rutting horns and snatching jaws, came
to his right hand. The hand that held the Swiss Army knife.
    His right arm had been hammered against a horn as the thing smashed itself through the windscreen. But he could bend that arm at the elbow, and he could grit his teeth, then part his jaws, and
scream too. And he screamed out his last as he pressed his tiny blade into that great black throat.
    A bellow from a mouth filling with liquid deafened him. He fell forward in his seat to the sound of two sword blades clashing.
    And it was gone from his face, his chest, the cabin, from the bonnet. Wet damp air came in through the shattered windscreen to temper the abattoir stink all about him.
    Silence.
    And then coughing, out there, in the dark wet forever of trees. Coughing as if to clear a throat of a fine bone. Luke looked at his right hand; it was empty.
    The engine had stalled. There was no steering wheel.
    He closed his eyes. Then opened them. His mouth was wet. Blood. His nose was smashed.
    He pushed the rifle out and onto the bonnet. Then followed it with his own naked body.

SIXTY-NINE
    He never heard it cough again, or bark, or yip like a black-muzzled jackal. But he was not alone in those woods that arched over him, cut out the weak greyish sunlight,
and dripped heavy fragrant raindrops onto him like the branches and limbs of the trees were the ceiling of a limestone cave, glittery, timeless, and dreadful.
    No, he never heard it or saw it again. But other things kept pace with him.
    He swallowed and swallowed to ease the terrible thirst in a throat scorched by cordite. He would be cold, then hot and sweaty; he saw things and heard the voices of people that were not there;
he passed in and out of worlds. He walked. And he walked.
    Out of sight, the white people scurried. They chattered like little monkeys. They leapt up at the corner of his heavy eyes; they were small and pale like naked children.
    Twice in his delirium, he turned and knelt and fired the rifle into the trees at where he thought he had seen something small and pallid land on tiny feet and begin chittering. And then there
would be silence. An awful silence loaded with anticipation and vague hopes. Before it began again: the prancing of little feet on the wet forest floor just out of sight, and the crying out of
small mouths in the distant undergrowth.
    She had quite a brood; so many young. Moder was hurt and her young were angry. If he fell and passed out with exhaustion, he knew they would take him from his own dreams and from the wet
mud his feet slid about in. So he walked and he walked and he talked to himself to keep them from taking him.
    It must have been early evening when he came to the end of the track and saw the sky in what felt like the first time in years. The track simply ended and when he turned and
looked back at the great wall of trees, it was like he stood in a coastal cove, peninsulas on either side, and had passed out of a crack in the cliff face, or a well-hidden cave. He could no longer
see the end of the track he had just walked for the best part of a day and evening, nor any break in the thickets of undergrowth, rising tangled to the height of a man.
    He had come on to a rocky plane, windswept and misty with rain. Grey, moss green, and whitish stone, forever. Besides a scattering of small birch trees it was arid, desolate like the bottom of
some great ocean that had been drained.
    A great suffocating feeling of solitude came over him in the bleak stillness; he felt lonelier than he had ever been before in his memory, but also suffered a mad urge to wander farther, forever
amongst the massive boulders. It looked uncannily familiar too, like he was back where he had started from, all that time ago. So long ago, with his three best friends all around him.
    When he put some distance between himself and the edge of the forest, he sat down and rested, yanking his head up