The Ritual

were closer these days than he and Hutch. And he’d
always considered Hutch to be his best friend. It made him envious because Dom and Hutch were better friends. They’d all known each other for fifteen years, but Dom and Hutch were just as
close as they had been back at university. They even shared a tent. Both Luke and Phil felt short-changed by the arrangement; Luke could tell Phil felt the same way, even though it would be
impossible for them to admit it without offending each other.
    Dom pulled a boot off. ‘Some holiday, you tosser. We’re lost. You haven’t got a clue where we are, have you, you mincing fruit?’
    ‘Dom, cool your boots. Just about a click that way’ – Hutch pointed in the direction they had been scrambling towards – ‘you’ll be eating hot beans and
sausage beside a river. There’s a quartet of Swedish beauties pitching their tent right about now, and getting the camp fire ready. Relax.’
    Phil laughed. Luke smiled. Dom felt obliged to join in, but in seconds his laughter was genuine. And then they were all laughing. At themselves, at their fear, at the thing up in the tree. Now
they were away from it laughter was good. It felt necessary.

THREE
    They never found the river, and the mouth-watering dream of Swedish girls and hot beans with sausage dimmed like the September light, and then vanished along with any
expectation of finding the end of the forest that day.
    While the other three squatted in silence – Luke sitting apart from Dom and Phil, who wolfed energy bars – Hutch glared at the map again, for what must have been the fifth time in an
hour. With a dirty finger, he traced the intended short cut between the Sörstubba trail they had abandoned at midday and the river trail. He swallowed again at the frisson of panic that had
appeared in his throat as the light started to dim.
    In the morning he had known exactly where they were on the map, where they were in the Gällivare municipality, where they were in Norrbotten County, and where they were in Sweden. By late
afternoon, with the glimpses of sky through the treetops changing from a thin grey to a thicker grey, he was no longer certain where they were in the forest that intersected the two trails. And he
never anticipated so much broken ground or the impenetrable thickets when he chose this route.
    Which wasn’t making any sense at all. They were no longer even following an approximation of a direct course; the sense of moving in the right direction stopped for him over two hours
before. The forest was leading them. They needed to move south west, but once they were four kilometres deep it was as if they were being pulled due west, and sometimes even northwards again. They
could only move where the foliage was thin, or where spaces occurred naturally between the ancient trees, so they were never moving in the right direction for very long. He should have compensated
for that. Shit.
    He glanced over his shoulder at the others. Maybe it was time for another judgement call: to go back the way they had come in. But if he could even find the haphazard route now, it would be dark
by the time they returned to the place from where they had started at midday. And it would mean going past that tree again, with the animal hanging from it. He could not see the idea going over
well with Dom and Phil. Luke would be cool with it. The forest made him uneasy too; he could tell. Luke’s lips moved as he talked to himself; always a sign. And since they had been so deep
among the trees he’d been smoking constantly; another bad sign.
    At least the exertion was limiting the speculation on how the corpse came to be hanging from the tree. Hutch had never seen, read, or heard of anything like it; not in twenty years engaged in
outdoor pursuits. It had confounded Luke too; he could tell his friend was still struggling with the mystery in silence. And also thinking exactly what he was thinking: what the hell could do
that to a large animal? In his mind Hutch ran through images of bears, lynx, wolverine, wolves. No fits, but it was one of those. Had to be. Maybe even a man. Which seemed even more disturbing
than an animal performing such a slaughter. But whatever had done that much damage to a body, wasn’t far away.
    ‘On your feet, men.’
    Luke tossed his butt and stood up.
    ‘Piss off,’ Dom said.
    ‘Here, here,’ Phil added.
    Dom looked up at Hutch. The lines at the side of Dom’s mouth cut deep furrows