The Ritual

talking. He didn’t speak but raised his pack and slipped his arms through the straps.
    ‘New ground?’ Luke asked, in a conciliatory tone.
    Hutch nodded.
    ‘Cool. And if anyone has any water, I’d sure appreciate a mouthful.’
    ‘I’m all out,’ Phil said, and scrabbled for his pack, as if terrified the others were about to leave him behind.
    Hutch handed his drinking bottle to Luke. It was half full. The last of it.

TWENTY-SIX
    Cramped inside the tiny porch of a tent, Hutch and Luke sat and watched the little gas flame stutter around the stove ring. Rain hazed into drizzle. Grey dusk-light dispersed
around the oncoming concussion of night. As every minute passed and they waited to see bubbles appear on the murky surface of the soup, it was becoming harder to see their feet, or where they had
put the plates and mugs. The ground was too wet for a fire; sopping, like all of the dead wood around them that could have made kindling.
    On the far side of the abandoned churchyard, the dwarf birch and willow were not so thick and the bracken and thorns between them had thinned, but their mobility had still been slowed, first by
the acres of ferns that grew out of marshy soil to waist-height, and then by ground made uneven with lichen-slippery, grey rock formations. It had taken nearly an hour at one point to manoeuvre Dom
over an outcrop of boulders. From the stony ground they entered more of the thick bracken. And since leaving the church, the canopy overhead had revealed only glimpses of a watery-grey sky.
    Hutch had called an end to their slow and hesitant progress through the forest at seven. There was still an hour, maybe even ninety minutes of light left, but Phil and Dom had gone beyond their
limit. Twice Dom had sat down in the woods, in silence, and been unable or unwilling to move. Phil’s movements had developed an ungainly, uncoordinated aspect, like he was drunk. In a way he
was; he was intoxicated with exhaustion.
    The darkness in the forest always made it appear later than it actually was. Watches were even checked; held up to ears to detect ticking. Even as early as four in the afternoon, under the
ancient leafy canopy it began to feel like night.
    They’d barely moved six, maybe seven kilometres all day.
    The forest floor about their campsite was so strewn with broken wood, the erection of the two tents in this spot had been nearly impossible. Behind them in the thinning light the tents sagged
and fluttered like discarded parachutes. Much ground had to be cleared first and Hutch’s fingers were scratched from scraping aside the dead wood and bracken to create a temporary clearing.
Now the two tents were up as best he and Luke could manage, crammed together and sagging, with so many roots, nettles and lumps visible beneath the groundsheets it would be impossible to lie down
comfortably and sleep inside them.
    Hutch anticipated a bad night ahead, sitting up or curled into a corner of the two-man tent. But at least it would be dry inside, or so Hutch promised the others. From the waist down they were
all soaked. The chafing inside Phil’s jeans was bad. He had managed to slowly peel the wet denim down to his knees, but doubted he would ever get them back on again so left them half down.
His inner thighs were now shiny in the faint light with a salve they could smell. Tomorrow, he would have to squeeze into the pair of filthy over-trousers Dom had worn during the first two days of
the hike. Phil lay down inside a tent, on top of his sleeping bag, in silence.
    Spread out over Hutch’s sleeping-bag cover was the remainder of their food supplies. There was hunger ahead. Dom had demanded a substantial lunch. As a result, in the little metal pot on
the camping stove was the last meal they could fashion together out of the two remaining packets of dried soup, a bag of soya mince, some freeze-dried savoury rice and the last tin of hot dog
sausages. After that, they were down to four energy bars each and one communal chocolate bar, some boiled sweets and chewing gum. And even tonight’s food would amount to little more than a
mug of soup each, cooked in pre-boiled marsh water, with two sausages standing upright in each of the four cups surrounded by soya mince. But not one of them could concentrate on anything but the
slow advance of the pot’s contents to readiness.
    At the perimeter of one of the stony outcrops, Luke had found a creek. Water that never grew beyond a brownish trickle