The Ritual

confident.
    Phil’s lips trembled like a child’s in the middle of a fright. His voice was too low for words to be heard. When Hutch touched the fingers of one hand, Phil whimpered and dropped his
head between tensed shoulders.
    ‘It’s all right, mate.’ Hutch held Phil’s hand and gently led him from the annex. The smell of stale urine on damp wood came out with him.
    He was covered in his blue waterproof by Dom, huddled out the door of the hovel by Hutch, and taken into the dull aluminium light of early morning.
    The forest around the wild paddock looked exhausted after the lightning storm, even relieved. Long wet grass and the cold fresh air revived Phil. He came back to them, to the world, with three
powerful heaving sobs that sounded incongruous, strange, unlike any sound they had heard Phil make in their presence before. And then he was standing before them, blinking, with only the top half
of his indignity covered. His forlorn eyes questioned each of them, but he received no answer, no understanding. The other three just returned a sense of awkwardness and mystification to him. And
they could not hold his intense stare for long.
    Hutch turned back to the hovel. ‘Come on. Let’s get packed up.’
    Luke moved ahead of him. ‘Amen to that.’
    ‘Wait,’ Dom said. ‘What the fuck?’
    Luke nodded at the hovel. ‘I told you it was a bad idea. Who knows what we stirred up.’ He was about to elaborate, but thought better of it. Phil and Dom stared at Luke, their faces
stricken with a desperation to comprehend what he had just suggested.
    Hutch paused on the threshold, looked over his shoulder, his face grimed with smoke and dirt. His eyes appeared too big for his dirty face. ‘There’ll be time to talk about it when
we’re tear-arsing out of here.’

SIXTEEN
    ‘How about here?’ Dom leaned forward, his arms hurriedly pulling at the undergrowth, trying to move saplings and nettles aside to find a section of the dreary
silent forest clear enough for them to walk through.
    The remnants of the path that brought them here continued out of the clearing due north, in the opposite direction they needed to take. The tension among the others, their very desperation to
get away from the house fast, seemed to bustle all about Hutch’s body and get inside his thoughts. Mostly, he just avoided their eyes as he scratched about for a solution in silence.
    Again, they were thwarted. Needed to move out in a south-westerly direction, to correct the easterly drift along the path the evening before. The edge of the forest in the thinnest band of trees
on the map could not be more than six, maybe seven kilometres away, but only if they followed a south-westerly route, then turned due south at some point. There was no way he was going to start the
day by leading them north; he reckoned Dom had half a day’s limited mobility left in his bad leg.
    ‘Hand me the machete and we’ll make a start,’ Hutch said, at the south side of the paddock, further along the treeline from Dom.
    ‘Then where?’ Dom’s voice broke into a shriek. ‘How the bloody hell do we get out of here?’
    From the western side of the clearing, Luke jogged over and stood behind Hutch. ‘Anything?’
    Hutch pulled his torso back from behind a dead spruce tree. ‘Nothing over here. It’s all debris. Full of snags and logs. Even the standing trees are dead. I can’t see further
than fifteen feet. It’s worse than anything we saw yesterday.’ Like it built up overnight, he was tempted to say out loud in the spirit of the paranoid frustration they were all
directing into him. ‘We’ll never force a path through. We could try, but we’d move about ten feet an hour.’
    Dom seized a handful of dwarf willow and yanked at it, his teeth set in a grimace. ‘Why? Why is it like this?’ A branch bent to him, and then stopped moving, burning his hands and
greening them with a watery sap. Dom dropped the branch, but kicked uselessly at it with his good leg. Then winced in pain. ‘Shit! What about that right to roam bullshit-line you sold us back
home? Who can roam through this crap?’
    ‘It’s virgin forest.’
    ‘What? It’s bloody dead, H. There’s nothing virginal about it.’
    Hutch looked at Luke’s tired face. ‘Lukers, toss us a fag.’
    Luke handed Hutch his packet of Camels. Hutch leaned into the flame of the Zippo. Took a long drag and then wiped at the sweat on his forehead, before inspecting the back of his hand