THIRTY-FOUR

‘I’ll never get across it.’ Bright-red skin shone through the patchwork of dirt on Dom’s face. He leaned a shoulder against a tree, angling the crutch into the spongy ground to hold himself upright. The crutch was a discarded tree branch at the right length and thick enough to be sturdy; it even had a V-shape crook to slip under an armpit. A third attempt at a walking aid; the first two having been discarded as ineffective. Luke found them all in the undergrowth after they left the dismal place where Hutch still hung from the trees.

Sat on a broad rock at the edge of the gorge, Luke tossed the tent bag to one side and let the two rucksacks he had been carrying drop to the ground with a smack. Phil came to a standstill behind him, hands on his knees, bowed by exhaustion and disappointment. His breath wheezed through his open mouth.

‘When will we ever get a break?’ Dom said to himself.

‘Take a hit off that inhaler, mate,’ Luke said to Phil, without looking at him. ‘You sound awful.’

Phil rummaged in the pocket of his waterproof.

Clambering in a tight pack, through two miles of undergrowth-tangle on increasingly stony ground that rose uphill, only to emerge through the treeline and be confronted by a valley with steep sides, returned a familiar anxiety to Luke. The notion that had become an idea, and now felt like an acceptance of a fact that they would die out here, threatened to swallow him again.

Dipping away from their feet, large boulders covered the descent into the ravine; the exposed surfaces of the rocks were yellow and pale green with lichen. In the basin of the gorge, a forest of long-stemmed plants with rubbery umbrella-like leaves stretched for thirty metres to the other side, where a rocky ascent waited to take them back onto a swampy soil dense with fir and pine. A strip marsh. Luke checked his watch: 1 p.m.

A soft quiet light fell into the gorge; the most light they had seen falling from the flat grey sky since the cemetery the day before. The rain came down steadily inside the light, chilling the cleaner air. It had a force to its vertical descent and had become increasingly audible against the surrounding rocks. It would become drenching soon; Luke could feel it, could anticipate it now.

Motivated by a fear that would have become group hysteria had they allowed their tired minds to dwell upon it, they had left poor Hutch behind them at eleven and put their heads down and into a slow but consistent progression upwards to this: a gorge, insurmountable in their condition. It stretched out of sight in both directions, until the sudden crevice turned away through the misty trees.

The fact that Hutch was no longer alive – alive – had not completely registered with any of them. It could not; their exhaustion forbade it. Luke welcomed the numbness; such an incomprehensible fact had stunned his emotions. But now and again, the full truth would crash back into his thoughts, and those of the others, and someone would sob, or say, ‘Oh, God no,’ to themselves as they all hobbled and staggered through the trees together. It was inconceivable. They were living in the inconceivable.

‘Water. And some calories,’ Luke said, hoping to regain some clarity. Dehydration was making his thoughts vague. Ideas came and went, swimming weakly. His lungs were flat, his speech slurring. He was too tired to do much but pant a few words at the others. ‘Take a load off. We’ve earned it. Never mind this bollocks, we’ve made good progress this morning. You’ve done well. Both of you.’

It was the first time he’d really spoken for over an hour. He’d been too tired even to pant monosyllables of encouragement or advice to the others. Carrying the tent, his own rucksack on his back and Dom’s pack strapped to his front, the morning’s hike on rocky terrain had taken him to the end of his endurance and it was only early afternoon. Between the two straps of the packs, his shoulders had been squeezed into terrible aches he could not relieve by repositioning the weight. He’d bitten down on the discomfort and just pushed on until his vision blurred. And yet he had still needed to stop every few minutes when one of the others called out to tell him to ‘hold up’ or ‘slow down’, worried he was pulling too far ahead of them. His neck now throbbed with pain after having to look either side of Dom’s rucksack to see where he was placing his feet. A twisted ankle and they might as well all strip naked and wait for the end.

He hated the lack of mobility, especially with his arms. If they had been attacked precious seconds would have been lost while he struggled out of the straps and loops. And their opponent was fast. Fast and silent, unless it chose to taunt them from a distance.

It could have taken any one of them within the last two hours, and Luke knew it. They’d eventually become too tired to 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 direction.’

‘But how long is it going to take? We should have come out of here the day before yesterday, and been on the other side of the forest. This bit is not that thick on the map.’ Dom spread his dirty fingers across the paper, his eyes frantically searching the colours and shapes and dotted lines, hoping they might suddenly provide a clue as to where they were now sitting.

But it was hardly only a ‘bit’ or patch of forest. In some areas the forest was at least fifty kilometres deep and from what they had seen of it, mostly impenetrable or unmanaged virgin forest. It had been Hutch’s intention to just cut through a far westerly band, where the forest was at its thinnest. No more than ten kilometres deep according to the map. But Luke wondered if they had blundered off the original trajectory Hutch envisaged them taking, while following the track to the old church. They’d also been repeatedly turned about by the terrain and its impenetrable foliage; had walked due west, due east, north west and south west at various times. They’d spent most of the previous day walking west, and even north west, according to the compass, instead of moving south west before angling directly south and down to what Hutch was sure was the lower edge of the forest on the map, with the river running beneath it. That had been the plan. But now H wasn’t with them, Luke had turned them due south that morning so they wouldn’t overshoot the narrowest section of forest. Which was fine if they were positioned where he’d guessed they were. But if they had strayed too far west the previous day and entered the adjacent thicker belt of forest they were now looking at thirty kilometres of hard terrain and forest so old and dark, the hours of sunlight barely lightened the earth. If they had continued to walk west, eventually, they would have emerged in Norway. Similar endgame situation again if they hadn’t corrected far enough in a south-westerly direction the day before, and the due south course he had set that morning pitched them far into a broader area of eastern wilderness. It would take about three days’ walking to get through the bigger and more densely forested areas on either side of the narrow band they hoped they were inside, but only if they were fit; for him, if he were alone, that would mean another two, possibly three nights, without food. But for the other two, who were injured … Luke felt sick and lightheaded.

‘I mean, what if we get over this fucking hole, and then there’s another one, just like it, on the other side?’

He’d not even thought of that, but now Dom had voiced the concern, Luke believed it to be entirely possible. Patterns of terrain often repeated themselves, or sometimes they were just single anomalies. There were marshes all over the map on either side of the narrow band of forest. Like the woodland functioned as a funnel; a trap, if you were foolish enough to take a short cut through it, hoping to avoid the bordering wetlands. The very thought seemed to drain the last of his strength as he imagined a bird’s-eye view of a topography revealing long deep ravines parallel to this one, a rib cage stretching for miles. It would be the end of them.

Luke made an energy bar vanish in two bites and immediately thought about ripping into a second. The other two were already chewing the end of their second bars, which meant they should each have three left. Hutch’s last four had been divided equally, with one left in reserve that he held on to along with the chocolate bar. To remind the others of the perilous situation he said, ‘I reckon we should eat two more bars tonight, with coffee and loads of sugar in it. We have the gas for another night and morning. That’ll leave one energy bar each in reserve with the chocolate if needs be.’ He didn’t say tomorrow, but since they had been forced to sit down and face the gorge, the idea of another night together in the open, with two of them keeping watch with knives drawn while the third slept, had begun to fill his chest with a pressure so terrible he could not swallow or exhale with any ease. But the inference, the threat of another night out here, was implicit in his voice.

Each bar contained 183 calories. With two consumed now, and two eaten later they still would not even scrape 1,000 calories each, and they were still facing hours of extreme exertion ahead, hiking into the cold and wet.

‘Those were my last two,’ Phil said emotionlessly, and looked at the filthy palms of his hands.

Luke stared at Phil’s tousled head and swallowed. ‘Tell me you are joking?’

‘Mate, we’re burning off a lot of fucking calories here,’ Dom snapped. Even this tired and he still had energy for attitude.

‘So what are you going to eat later?’

‘We’ll need that chocolate,’ Dom said, his face stiffening to a challenge.

‘We? You’ve eaten all yours too?’

Dom nodded, without a trace of shame or regret evident in his expression. ‘And I’m still starving.’

Luke turned away and stared across the ravine in silence. He could be across it in twenty minutes, maybe less. The idea excited him. And it was the best possible course of action available after all, he thought, as he resurrected the original strategy he’d discussed with Hutch the night before.

If he dropped both packs and the tent and put everything he had left inside himself into the hike, he could walk steadily until nine before it became too dark to walk any further safely. That would still give him another eight hours unimpeded and unencumbered by this pair. He might even make it out of the forest tonight if he was walking in the right direction. He could leave the others here with the tent, beside a notable feature that would be visible from the air. They had water. No food, but whose fault was that? They would just have to wrap up warm, get into their bags and take it in turns to keep watch, maybe get a fire going.

But if they survived tonight, they’d have to spend another night out here too. Because even if he made it out of the forest later that evening, at least one more day of walking would be necessary to even locate the next minor road or settlement and organize a rescue. Two nights with no food and one of them injured. Would they even get a fire going? They had lighters, but just about everything around them was too wet to burn. This was the fourth day of constant rain or drizzle; it would take hours to get the most serviceable wood together to keep a fire going for any length of time. And the gas would be gone by tomorrow morning.

His thoughts sped from one scenario to another, and then slowed to consider the repercussions of each potential choice. But no matter what he considered and then dismissed, he still knew his own best chance of survival was to strike out alone.

‘So what now? How the fuck do I get across this?’ There was a note of accusation in Dom’s tone of voice.

‘Maybe …’ Luke said quietly.

‘Maybe what?’

‘Maybe we go back to the original plan.’

‘Original plan? The original plan was to get the fuck out of here as quickly as possible, by the most direct route. Are we not still following the original plan?’

It was the sarcasm. Always the sarcasm. Would it ever end? Hobbling around on his useless knee, criticizing, always complaining. Luke was his only chance of survival and still he was contemptuous. ‘You’re not going to like what I’m about to suggest.’

‘I’ll fucking put money on it, eh Phillers?’

Phil looked bewildered. ‘What?’

‘He’s thinking of taking off. Aren’t you? And just bloody leaving us here.’

‘Look—’

‘I can’t believe you’d even consider it.’

Luke clenched his jaw. ‘If you could walk properly, would you even be here now?’

‘What?’ Dom shook his head in disgust. ‘Well, I never. Though I don’t know why I’m surprised. You take over the map and play Hutch all day. Get us even more lost than we were already. And when we reach this crater, you’re going to just leave us. When we agreed this morning that we would stick together.’

‘You said, Luke. You said,’ Phil blurted out with an urgency that filled Luke’s head with confusion.

‘It’s not like that.’

‘From where I am sitting it fucking is. Every man for himself now is it? Well go on. Fuck off then. Fuck us.’

‘Listen—’

‘I’m sick of listening. First Hutch’s bright ideas that got himself killed, and now yours. And we’re still fucking here. Fucking lost. So fucking lost.’ His voice trailed off into a breathy hopelessness that made Luke feel every tired sinew and fibre cry out within his own body for it all to just stop. Please God, just let it stop now.

Luke stood up. Dom flinched. Phil’s body tensed. They thought he might hit them. Why? He wasn’t like that. Or was he? And was he just abandoning them because they were slowing him down, or was he really trying to save them all? Maybe Dom was right and he was only trying to rationalize his own selfish desire to survive. In extreme situations self-preservation did take over. Was it time for him to cut the rope, or go down with them too? He didn’t know any more.

He suddenly felt ashamed; visualized himself walking away from these two forlorn figures, sitting beside a half-collapsed tent. Neither of them could even erect one. He and Hutch had put both tents up every night from the beginning of the trip.

Luke pointed down and into the ravine, desperate to displace another confrontation. He glanced at Dom. ‘Can you get across that?’

‘Yes.’

‘For real?’

‘Yes for fucking real.’

‘OK then. Let’s do it.’

Phil rapidly looked at each of them in turn. ‘Safety in numbers, ’ he said, his voice rising to form a question within the statement.