The Ritual

suggested.
    ‘Wolverine?’
    ‘I have no idea what they sound like.’
    ‘Bear?’
    ‘Possibly. But they’re too small to be dangerous up here. Just clap your hands if one comes snuffling around.’
    Try as he might, Luke could not picture a small bear.
    After ten minutes of silence, Hutch stood up with a groan. He seemed satisfied that there was no danger, which alarmed Luke, who was too anxious to feel foolish, but was stunned to silence by
Hutch’s confidence as he then said, ‘I’m going to turn in, Chief, and try and get some kip. Give me a shake before you take off tomorrow. We need to look at the map and talk
tactics.’
    ‘Sure. No problem. Best if I leave soon as it is light,’ Luke said, over one shoulder while still flicking his torch about the treeline that any of them could simply reach out and
touch from the mouth of a tent, so close was the forest about their ramshackle camp.
    Hutch nodded. ‘I can’t see us lot moving far. I’m beginning to think we might be better off waiting here for a day until Dom’s knee goes down a bit. We’ve got
enough water. And at least you’ll know where we are. Roughly.’
    After discussing this matter of survival almost nonchalantly, Hutch unzipped the fly of the tent he shared with Dom and began fumbling at his laces, as if this situation was suddenly all banal
again, some kind of camping formality without terror being involved. But it was involved, at least in Luke’s thoughts; Hutch was just too exhausted in the cold, strange, pitch-black
world to inject much else into the sound of the cries at this hour.
    ‘Night,’ he said to Hutch.
    ‘Night,’ Hutch replied under the noise of the tent’s zipper going back up. Luke watched the tent shake about as Hutch prepared his bedding, saw the bright yellow disc of
torchlight skim about the inside of the tent like the luminous eye at a porthole of some submersible craft, with the forest about them a deep black sea.
    Luke sat down within the awning of his tent, listened beyond Phil’s wheezy breathing and Dom’s snoring. In minutes of his torch being clicked off, Hutch was whistling through his
nose as he too fell into a heavy sleep.
    Luke took out his cigarette packet. His face and skin were burning from exhaustion, his head felt unnaturally heavy, but his mind was still too active to let itself fully rest. At least out here
he could smoke.
    He lit up. Smoked the cigarette slowly. And silently, he asked himself again, how was it that some people got left behind?
    When he finished the cigarette, he wiped at his eyes and climbed into the tent he shared with Phil.

TWENTY-EIGHT
    The moon, large and so bright. Is it possible for it to be so near the earth? To arc across the night sky from one end of the horizon to the other?
    Silver light frosts the treetops that stretch away forever. Near the ground, the air is bluish-white and gassy as moonlight mingles with the cold. And the wood looks like the bristling surface
of an army, with lances, standards and great armoured backs rising out of a dark mass, once seething forward and now frozen as if a terrible march or retreat has been suspended. But it parts around
this place. Avoids it. Thick trunks of ancient trees and whipping walls of bracken pull back from the edge of the paddock, from where they uneasily circle the loose, faded and stained tents.
Nothing but long weeds and grass dare to mill about the campsite.
    And what is that hanging from the treeline? Stretched between the black fringe of the wood like washing blown from a line and caught in the high tiers of forlorn branch and limb, something
flutters. They could be shirts, holed and ragged. Discarded things with torn sleeves. Three of them, matched with three sets of frayed leggings, thin as long johns arranged below. And all stained
with rust.
    Skins. Stripped from dead things. Peeled off and flung upwards to hang like pennants, about the place you sought refuge in.
    And now something is moving out there, through the vague and dark spaces behind the treeline. Wood cracks and splinters as it moves, just out of sight.
    Pacing the weed-fringed clearing it begins to announce itself more readily with a yipping sound that occasionally breaks into a bark, and soars up to the icy clarity of indigo-black sky. A cry
this place has known for a long time before you stood here, shivering and alone.
    It’s trying to tell you something.
    It is letting you know that you can wait for it here and watch