The Ritual

continue the furtive vigilance around whatever they had been crashing
and stumbling through. Maybe whatever or whoever it was only killed when it was hungry. The thought made Luke feel sick.
    But his carrying of the rucksacks and tent was the only solution to increasing Dom’s speed on his one good leg. His bad knee was tumescent and discoloured. There was no definition at all
around the knee cap. The skin under the bandage was tight and hot to the touch. Just looking at it made Luke’s eyes water. To mount even a slight gradient Dom shuffled sideways, using the
crutch like an ice axe while dragging his bad leg behind him so as not to place any weight on it at all. The leg needed to be raised and rested, maybe for three or four days before he should move
again. The more he stumbled about on the joint the worse it was becoming. All morning Dom’s face had been set in a permanent rictus from the pain and the fear of more pain if he slipped or
knocked his knee.
    At the top of the ravine, Dom and Phil sat on a boulder each and planted their boots into the wet moss between the rocks. They panted beside Luke and stared at their feet without seeing them.
Both of their waterproof coats were undone and their hoods were down. Hats were stuffed into trouser pockets. Each red face was coated with a film of grease and old dirt and shone with a sheen of
sweat.
    Gravity thickened around Luke. Responsibility like a tangible weight made the rock under his buttocks harden. He’d never led anything in his life before and they had all been reliant on
Hutch for the entire hike. From deep inside his belly, anger flared up through him, revived him. What had H been thinking, taking these two off piste like this? The entire trip had been far too
ambitious for Dom and Phil, even without plunging them into unknown terrain, hoping for a short cut.
    Luke took three mouthfuls of water from his bottle. It tasted of rubber and of the forest around them: the cloying of damp wood, rotting leaves and cold air. He detested it. He smelled of it
too. They were almost part of it now. Just a few bright colours of the manmade fibres they wore marked them out as any different to the thoughtless, relentless decay of season and nature. It would
be so easy now to just sink to the ground and get recycled, to be eaten or to rot away. The endlessness of it, the sheer size of the land and their total insignificance within it nearly shut his
mind down.
    He spread the map across his thighs before the other two noticed the tremors of panic that must have been visible in his face and in his fingers. He searched the green and brown shapes on the
map, but could not comprehend much of what he was looking at because his head was so padded with fatigue and exhaustion. The map indicated it was a national park, that they were in a collective of
forest and marsh, but failed to indicate any individual contour or noticeable feature they could identify to orientate from. He was feeling listless, and apathetic too now; it didn’t abet
concentration. What did that mean? Hypothermia. Not possible. They were wet and became cold when they stopped moving, but were not soaked to the skin or shivering. Not yet.
    ‘Where are we?’ Dom shuffled sideways to an adjoining stone.
    How the hell did he know? He could not even understand how much ground they had covered that morning. It felt like they had stumbled for miles, but rough terrain outdoors in a wilderness played
tricks on the mind. He and Hutch had been lost together once before, six years ago, while walking back from a beach on an island in the Swedish archipelago, wearing only T-shirts and shorts. The
island was barely five miles long and two miles across, but somehow they’d turned themselves around and become scratched all over, eventually arriving back at the exact point they had left
two hours earlier. Impossible, as they had been convinced they had moved due east in a straight trajectory. At least here they had a compass, but it still didn’t supply the answer to where
they actually were, or how far they were moving. Never as far as it seemed; he had enough experience to know that much.
    ‘Problem is,’ Luke said, avoiding Dom’s eyes as he spoke, ‘it’s hard to know how much ground we have covered since we first came in, over the best part of three
days now.’
    Dom sighed and shook his head. It felt like an accusation and made Luke suddenly defensive. ‘But we are heading in the right