Longshot

Chapter 17

‘Put a cross,’ I said.

Doone shook his head. ‘You admire him. You could be blinded.’

I thought it over. ‘I do in many ways admire him, I admit. I admire his riding, his professionalism. He’s courageous. He’s a realist.’ I paused. ‘I’ll agree that on the For side you could put the things you listed the other day, that he has all the skills to set the trap and the perfect place to do it.’

‘Go on,’ Doone nodded.

‘You’d begun actively investigating him,’ I said.

‘Yes, I had.’

‘He’d rolled around a bit with Angela Brickell,’ I said, ‘and that’s where we come to the biggest Against.’

‘You’re not saying he couldn’t have had the irritation, the nerve, the strength to strangle her?’

‘No, I’m not, though I don’t think he did it. What I’m saying is that he wouldn’t have taken her out into the woods. He told you himself he moves a mattress into the boathouse on such occasions. If he’d strangled her on impulse it would have been there, and he could have slid her weighted body into the river, no one the wiser.’

Doone listened with his head on one side. ‘But what if he’d deliberately planned it? What if he’d suggested the woods as being far away from his own territory?’

‘I wouldn’t think he’d need to cover his sins with strangulation,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows he seduces anything that moves. He would pass off an Angela Brickell sort of scandal with a laugh.’

Doone disapproved, saying, ‘Unsavoury,’ and maybe thinking of his assailable daughters.

‘We haven’t got very far,’ I said, looking at his list. All my own assessments were a cross except the question mark against Nolan. Not awfully helpful, I thought.

Doone clicked his pen a few times, then at the bottom wrote LEWIS EVERARD.

‘That’s a long shot,’ I said.

‘Give me some Fors and Againsts.’

I pondered. ‘Against first. I don’t think he’s bold enough to have set that trap, but then...’ I hesitated, ‘there’s no doubt he’s both clever and cunning. I wouldn’t have thought he would have gone into the woods with Angela Brickell. Can’t exactly say why, but I’d think he’d be too fastidious, especially when he’s sober.’

‘For? Doone prompted, when I stopped.

‘He gets drunk... I don’t know if he’d tumble Angela Brickell in that state or not.’

‘But he knew her.’

‘Even if not in the biblical sense,’ I agreed.

‘Sir!’ he said with mock reproach.

‘He would have seen her at the races,’ I said, smiling. ‘And For... he is a good liar. According to him, he’s the best actor of the lot.’

‘A question mark, then?’ Doone’s pen hovered.

I slowly shook my head. ‘A cross.’

‘The trouble with you,’ Doone said with disillusion, looking at the column of negatives, ‘is that you haven’t met enough murderers.’

‘None,’ I agreed. ‘You can’t exactly count Nolan Everard.’

‘And you wouldn’t know a murderer if you tripped over one.’

‘Your list is too short,’ I said.

‘It seems so.’ He put away the notebook and stood up. ‘Well, Mr Kendall, thank you for your time. I don’t discount your impressions. You’ve helped me clarify my thoughts. Now we’ll have to step up our enquiries. We’ll get there in the end.’

The sing-song accent came to a stop and he shook my hand and let himself out, a grey man in grey clothes following his own informal, idiosyncratic path towards the truth.

I sat for a while thinking of what I’d said and of what he’d told me, and I still couldn’t believe that any of the people I’d come to know so well was really a murderer. No one was a villain, not even Nolan. There had to be someone else, someone we hadn’t begun to consider.

I worked on and off on Tremayne’s book for the rest of the morning but found it hard to concentrate.

Dee-Dee drifted in and out, offering coffee and company, and Tremayne put his head in to say he was going to Oxford to see his tailor, and to ask if I wanted an opportunity to shop.

I thanked him and declined. I would probably have liked to replace my boots and ski-jacket, but I still hadn’t much personal money. It was easy at Shellerton House to get by without any. Tremayne would doubtless have lent me some of the quarter-advance due at the end of the month but my lack was my own choice, and as long as I could survive as I was, I wouldn’t ask. It was all part of the game.

Mackie came through from her side to keep company with Dee-Dee, saying Perkin had gone to Newbury to collect some supplies, and presently the two women went out to lunch together, leaving me alone in the great sprawling house.

I tried again and harder to work and felt restless and uneasy. Stupid, I thought. Being alone never bothered me: in fact, I liked it. That day, I found the size of the silent house oppressive.

I went upstairs, showered and changed out of riding clothes into the more comfortable jeans and shirt I’d worn the day before and pulled on sneakers and the red sweater for warmth. After that I went down to the kitchen and made a cheese sandwich for lunch and wished I’d gone with Tremayne if only for the ride. It was the usual pattern of finding something to do — anything — rather than sit down and face the empty page, except that that day the uneasiness was extra.

I wandered in a desultory fashion into the family room which looked dead without the fire blazing and began to wonder what I could make for dinner. Gareth’s ‘BACK FOR GRUB’ message was still pinned to the corkboard, and it was with a distinct sense of release that I remembered I’d said that I would go back for his camera.

The unease vanished. I found a piece of paper and left my own message: ‘I’VE BORROWED THE LAND ROVER TO FETCH GARETH’S CAMERA. BACK FOR COOKING THE GRUB!’ I pinned it to the corkboard with a red drawing pin and a light heart, and went upstairs again to change back into jodhpur boots to deal with the terrain and to pick up the map and the compass in case I couldn’t find the trail. Then I skipped downstairs and went out to the wheels, locking the back door behind me.

It was a good day, sunny like the day before but with more wind. With a feeling of having been unexpectedly let out of school, I drove over the hills on the road to Reading and coasted along the unfenced part of the Quillersedge Estate until I thought I’d come more or less to where Gareth had dropped the paint: parked off the road there and searched more closely for the place on foot.

No one had driven the paint away on their tyres. The splash was dusty but still visible and, without much trouble, I found the beginning of the trail about twenty feet straight ahead in the wood and followed it as easily through the tangled trees and undergrowth as on the day before.

Gareth a murderer... I smiled to myself at the absurdity of it. As well suspect Coconut.

The pale paint splashes, the next one ahead visible all the time, weren’t all that marked the trail: it showed signs in broken twigs and scuffed ground of our passage the day before. By the time I came back with the camera it would be almost a beaten track.

Wind rattled and swayed the trees and filled my ears with the old songs of the land, and the sun shone through the moving boughs in shimmering ever-changing patterns. I wound my slow way through the maze of unpruned growth and felt at one with things there and inexpressibly happy.

The trail strayed round and eventually reached the small clearing. Our improvised seats were frayed by the wind but still identified the place with certainty, and almost at once I spotted Gareth’s camera, prominently hanging, as he’d said, from a branch.

I walked across to collect it and something hit me very hard indeed in the back.

Moments of disaster are disorientating. I didn’t know what had happened. The world had changed. I was falling. I was lying face down on the ground. There was something wrong with my breathing.

I had heard nothing but the wind, seen nothing but the moving trees but, I thought incredulously, someone had shot me.

From total instinct as much as from injury I lay as dead. There was a zipping noise beside my ear as something sped past it. I shut my eyes. There was another jolting thud in my back.

So this was death, I thought numbly; and I didn’t even know who was killing me, and I didn’t know why.

Breathing was terrible. My chest was on fire. A wave of clammy perspiration broke out on my skin.

I lay unmoving.

My face was on dead leaves and dried grass and pieces of twig. I could smell the musty earth. Earth-digested, come to dust.

Someone, I thought dimly, was waiting to see if I moved: and if I moved there would be a third thud and my heart would stop. If I didn’t move someone would come and feel for a pulse and, finding one, finish me off. Either way, everything that had been beginning was now ending, ebbing away without hope.

I lay still. Not a twitch.

I couldn’t hear anything but the wind in the trees. Could hear no one moving. Hadn’t heard even the shots.

Breathing was dreadful. A shaft of pain. Minimum air could go in, trickle out. Too little. In a while... I would go to sleep.

A long time seemed to pass, and I was still alive.

I had a vision of someone standing not far behind me with a gun, waiting for me to move. He was shadowy and had no face, and his patience was for ever.

Clammy nausea came again, enveloping and ominous. My skin sweated. I felt cold.

I didn’t exactly try to imagine what was happening in my body.

Lying still was anyway easier than moving. I would slide unmoving into eternity. The man with the gun could wait for ever, but I would be gone. I would cheat him that way.

That’s delirium, I thought.

Nothing happened in the clearing. I lay still. Time drifted.

After countless ages I seemed to come back to a real realization that I was continuing to breathe, even if with difficulty, and didn’t seem in immediate danger of stopping. However ghastly I might feel, however feeble, I wasn’t drowning in blood. Wasn’t coughing it up. Coughing was a bleak thought, the way my chest hurt.

My certainty of the waiting gun had begun to fade. He wouldn’t be there after all this time. He wouldn’t stand for ever doing nothing. He hadn’t felt my pulse. He must have thought it unnecessary.

He believed I was dead.

He had gone. I was alone.

It took me a while to believe those three things utterly and another while to risk acting on the belief.

If I didn’t move I would die where I lay.

With dread, but in the end inevitability, I moved my left arm.

Christ, I thought, that hurt.

Hurt it might, but nothing else happened.

I moved my right arm. Just as bad. Even worse.

No more thuds in the back, though. No quick steps, no pounce, no final curtain.

Perhaps I really was alone. I let the thought lie there for comfort. Wouldn’t contemplate a cat-and-mouse cruelty.

I put both palms flat on the decaying undergrowth and tried to heave myself up on to my knees.

Practically fainted. Not only could I not do it but the effort was so excruciating that I opened my mouth to scream and couldn’t breathe enough for that either. My weight settled back on the earth and I felt nothing but staggering agony and couldn’t think connectedly until it abated.

Something was odd, I thought finally. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t lift myself off the ground but that I was stuck to it in some way.

Cautiously, sweating, with fiery stabs in every inch, I wormed my right hand between my body and the earth and came to what seemed like a rod between the two.

I must have fallen on to a sharp stick, I thought. Perhaps I hadn’t been shot. But yes, I had. Hit in the back. Couldn’t mistake it.

Slowly, trying to ration the pain into manageable portions, I slid my hand out again, and then after a while, hardly believing it, I bent my arm and felt round my back and came to the rod there also, and faced the grim certainty that someone had shot me not with a bullet but an arrow.

I lay for a while simply wrestling with the enormity of it.

I had an arrow right through my body from back to front somewhere in the region of my lower ribs. Through my right lung, which was why I was breathing oddly. Not, miraculously, through any major blood vessels, or I would by now have bled internally to death. About level with my heart, but to one side.

Bad enough. Awful. But I was still alive.

I’d been hit twice, I remembered. Maybe I had two arrows through me. One or two, I was still alive.

‘Survival begins in the mind.’

I’d written that, and knew it to be true. But to survive an arrow a mile from a road with a killer around to make sure I didn’t make it... where in one’s mind did one search for the will to survive that? Where, when just getting to one’s knees loomed as an unavoidable torture and to lie and wait to be rescued appeared to be merely common sense.

I thought about rescue. A long long way off. No one would start looking for me for hours; not until after dark. The sun on my back was warm, but the February nights were still near zero and I was wearing only a sweater. Theoretically the luminous trail should lead rescuers to the clearing even at night... but any sensible murderer would have obliterated the road end of it after he’d found his own way out.

I couldn’t realistically be rescued before tomorrow. I thought I might die while I waited: might die in the night. People died of injuries sometimes because their bodies went into shock. General trauma, not just the wound, could kill.

One thought, one decision at a time.

Better die trying.

All right. Next decision.

Which way to go?

The trail seemed obvious enough, but my intended killer had come and gone that way — must have done — and if he should return for any reason I wouldn’t want to meet him.

I had a compass in my pocket.

The distant road lay almost due north of the clearing and the straightest line to the road lay well to the left of the paint trail.

I waited for energy, but it didn’t materialise.

Next decision: get up anyway.

The tip of the arrow couldn’t be far into the earth, I thought. I’d fallen with it already through me. It could be only an inch or so in. No more than a centimetre, maybe.

I shut my mind to the consequences, positioned my hands, and pushed.

The arrow tip came free and I lay on my side in frightful suffering weakness, looking down at a sharp black point sticking out from scarlet wool.

Black. The length of a finger. Hard and sharp. I touched the needle tip of it and wished I hadn’t.

Only one arrow. Only one all the way through, at least.

Not much blood, surprisingly. Or perhaps I couldn’t tell, blood being the same colour as the jersey, but there was no great wet patch.

A mile to the road seemed an impossible distance.

Moving an inch was taxing. Still, inches added up. Better get started.

First catch your compass...

With an inward smile and a mental sigh I retrieved the compass carefully from my pocket and took a bearing on north. North, it seemed, was where my feet were.

I rolled with effort to my knees and felt desperately, appallingly, overwhelmingly ill. The flicker of humour died fast. The waves of protest were so strong that I almost gave up there and then. Outraged tissues, invaded lungs, an overall warning.

I stayed on my knees, sitting back on my heels, head bowed, breathing as little as possible, staring at the protruding arrow, thinking the survival programme was too much.

There was a pale slim rod sticking into the ground beside me. I looked at it vaguely and then with more attention, remembering the thing that had sung past my ear.

An arrow that had missed me.

It was about as long as an arm. A peeled fine-grained stick, dead straight. A notch in its visible end, for slotting onto a bowstring. No feather to make a flight.

The guide books all gave instructions for making arrows.

‘Char the tips in hot embers to shrink and toughen the fibres for better penetration...’

The charred black tip had penetrated all right.

‘Cut two slots in the other end, one shallow one for the bowstring, one deep one to push a shaped feather into, to make a flight so that the arrow will travel straighter to the target.’

Illustrations thoughtfully provided.

If the three arrows had all had flights... if there’d been no wind...

I closed my eyes weakly. Even without flights, the aim had been deadly enough.

Gingerly, sweating, I curled my left hand behind my back and felt for the third arrow, and found it sticking out of my jersey though fairly loose in my hand. With trepidation I took a stronger hold of it and it came away altogether but with a sharp dagger of soreness, like digging out a splinter.

The black tip of that arrow was scarlet with blood, but I reckoned it hadn’t gone in further than a rib or my spine. I only had the first one to worry about.

Only the one.

Quite enough.

It would have been madness to pull it out, even if I could have faced doing it. In duels of old, it hadn’t always been the sword going into the lungs that had killed so much as the drawing of it out. The puncture let air rush in and out, spoiling nature’s enclosed vacuum system. With holes to the outer air, the lungs collapsed and couldn’t breathe. With the arrow still in place, the holes were virtually blocked. With the arrow in place, bleeding was held at bay. I might die with it in. I’d die quicker with it out.

The first rule of surviving a disaster, I had written, was to accept that it had happened and make the best of what was left. Self-pity, regrets, hopelesness and surrender would never get one home. Survival began, continued and was accomplished in the mind.

All right, I told myself, follow your own rules.

Accept the fact of the arrow. Accept your changed state. Accept that it hurts, that every moment will hurt for the foreseeable future. Take that for granted. Go on from there.

Still on my knees I edged round to face north.

The clearing was all mine: no man with a gun. No archer with a bow.

The day in some respects remained incredibly the same. The sun still threw its dappled mantle and the trees still creaked and resonantly vibrated in the oldest of symphonies. Many before me, I thought, had been shot by arrows in ancient woodland and faced their mortality in places that had looked like this before man started killing man.

But I, if I stirred myself, could reach surgeons and antibiotics and hooray for the National Health Service. I slowly shifted on my knees across the clearing, aiming to the left of the painted trail.

It wasn’t so bad...

It was awful.

For God’s sake, I told myself, ignore it. Get used to it. Think about north.

It wasn’t possible to go all the way to the road on one’s knees: the undergrowth was too thick, the saplings in places too close together. I would have to stand up.

So, OK, hauling on branches, I stood up.

Even my legs felt odd. I clung hard to a sapling with my eyes closed, waiting for things to get better, telling myself that if I fell down again it would be much much much worse.

North.

I opened my eyes eventually and took the compass out of my jeans pocket, where I’d stowed it to have hands free for standing up. Holding on still with one hand, I took a visual line ahead from the north needle to mark into memory the furthest small tree I could see, then put the compass away again and with infinite slowness clawed a way forward by inches and after a while reached the target and held on to it for dear life.

I had travelled perhaps ten yards. I felt exhausted.

‘Never get exhausted’, I had written. Dear God.

I rested out of necessity, out of weakness.

In a while I consulted the compass, memorised another young tree and made my way there. When I looked back I could no longer see the clearing.

I was committed, I thought. I wiped sweat off my forehead with my fingers and stood quietly, holding on, trying to let the oxygen level in my blood climb back to a functioning state.

A functioning mode, Gareth might have said.

Gareth...

Sherwood Forest, I thought, eight hundred years ago. Whose face should I pin on the Sheriff of Nottingham...

I went another ten yards, and another, careful always not to trip, holding onto branches as onto railings. My breath began wheezing from the exertion. Pain had finally become a constant. Ignore it. Weakness was more of a problem, and lack of breath.

Stopping again for things to calm down I began to do a few unwelcome sums. I had travelled perhaps fifty yards. It seemed a marathon to me but realistically it was roughly one thirty-fifth of a mile, which left thirty-four thirty-fifths still to go. I hadn’t timed the fifty yards but it had been no sprint. According to my watch it was already after four o’clock, a rotten piece of information borne out by the angle of the sun. Darkness lay ahead.

I would have to go as fast as I could while I could still see the way, and then rest for longer, and then probably crawl. Sensible plan, but not enough strength to go fast.

Fifty more yards in five sections. One more thirty-fifth of the way. Marvellous. It had taken me fifteen minutes.

More sums. At a speed of fifty yards in fifteen minutes it would take me another eight hours to reach the road. It would then be half-past midnight, and that didn’t take into account long rest or crawling.

Despair was easy. Survival wasn’t.

To hell with despair, I thought. Get on and walk.

The shaft of the arrow protruding from my back occasionally knocked against something, bringing me to a gasping halt. I didn’t know how long it was, couldn’t feel as far as the end, and I couldn’t always judge how much space I needed to keep it clear.

I’d come out on the simple camera-fetching errand without the complete zipped pouch of gadgets but I did have with me the belt holding my knife and the multi-purpose survival tool, and on the back of that tool there was a mirror. After the next fifty yards I drew it out and took a look at the bad news.

The shaft, straight, pale and rigid, stuck out about eighteen inches. There was a notch in the end for the bowstring, but no flight.

I didn’t look at my face in the mirror. Didn’t want to confirm how I felt. I returned the small tool to the pouch and went another fifty yards, taking care.

North. Ten yards visible at a time. Go ten yards. Five times ten yards. Short rest.

The sun sank lower on my left and the blue shadows of dusk began gathering on the pines and firs and creeping in among the sapling branches and the alders. In the wind, the shadows threw barred stripes and moved like prowling tigers.

Fifty yards, rest. Fifty yards, rest. Fifty yards, rest

Think of nothing else.

There would be moonlight later, I thought. Full moon was three days back. If the sky remained clear, I could go on by moonlight.

Dusk deepened until I could no longer see ten yards ahead, and after I’d knocked the shaft of the arrow against an unseen hazard twice within a minute I stopped and sank slowly down to my knees, resting my forehead and the front of my left shoulder against a young birch trunk, drained as I’d never been before.

Perhaps I would write a book about this one day, I thought.

Perhaps I would call it... Longshot.

A long shot with an arrow.

Perhaps not so long, though. No doubt from only a few yards out of the clearing, to get a straight view. A short shot, perhaps.

He’d been waiting there for me, I concluded. If he’d been following me he would have to have been close because I had gone straight to the camera, and I would have heard him, even in the wind. He’d been there first, waiting, and I’d walked up to the carefully prominent bait and presented him with a perfect target, a broad back in a scarlet sweater, an absolute cinch.

Traps.

I’d walked into one, as Harry had.

I leaned against the tree, sagging into it. I did feel comprehensively dreadful.

If I’d been the archer, I thought, I would have been waiting in position, crouched and camouflaged, endlessly patient, arrow notched on a bow. Along comes the target, happily unaware, going to the camera, putting himself in position. Stand up, aim... a whamming direct hit, first time lucky.

Shoot twice more at the fallen body. Pity to waste the arrows. Another nice hit.

Target obviously dead. Wait a bit to make sure. Maybe go near for a closer look. All well. Then retreat along the trail. Mission accomplished.

Who was the Sheriff of Nottingham...?

I tried to find a more comfortable position but there wasn’t one, really. To save my knees a bit I slid down onto my left hip, leaning my head and my left side against the tree. It was better than walking, better than fighting the tangle of woodland, but whether it was better than lying in the clearing I couldn’t decide. Yet he, the archer, might have gone back there to check again after all and if he had he would know I was alive, but he would never find me where I was now, deep in impenetrable shadow along a path he couldn’t follow in the dark.

It was ironic, I thought, that for the expedition for Gareth and Coconut I’d deliberately chosen to aim for a spot on the map that looked as remote from any road as possible. I should have had more sense.

The darkness intensified down in the wood though I could see stars between the boughs. I listened to the wind. Grew cold. Felt extremely alone.

I let go of things a bit. Simply existed. Let thoughts drift. I felt formless, part of time and space, an essence, a piece of cosmos. The awareness of the world’s antiquity which was often with me seemed to intensify, to be a solace. Everything was one. Every being was integral, but alone. One could dissolve and still exist... I hovered on the edge of consciousness, semi-asleep, making nonsense.

I relaxed too far. My weight shifted against the tree, slipping downwards, and the shaft of the arrow hit the ground. The explosive pain of it brought me hellishly back to full savage consciousness and to a revived desire not to become part of the eternal mystery just yet. I struggled back into equilibrium and tried to ride the pulverising waves of misery and found to my desperate dismay that the finger of arrow in front was almost an inch longer.

I’d pushed the arrow further through. I’d done hell knew what extra damage to my lung. I didn’t know how to bear what my body felt.

I went on breathing. Went on living. That’s all one could say.

The worst of it got better.

I sat for what seemed a long time in the cold darkness, breathing shallowly, not moving at all, just waiting, and eventually there was a lightening of the shadows and a luminosity in the wood, and the moon rose clear and bright in the east. To eyes long in the dark, it was as daylight.

Time to go. I pulled out the compass, held it horizontally close to my eyes, let the needle settle onto north, looked that way and mapped the first few feet in my mind.

Putting thought into action was an inevitable trial. Everything was sore, every muscle seemed wired directly to the arrow. Violent twinges shot up my nerves like steel lightning.

So what, I told myself. Stop bellyaching. Ignore what it feels like, concentrate on the journey.

Concentrate on the Sheriff...

I pulled myself to my feet again, rocked a bit, sweated, clung onto things, groaned a couple of times, gave myself lectures. Put one foot in front of the other, the only way home.

Knocking the arrow seemed after all not to have been the ultimate disaster. Moving seemed to require the same amount of breath as before, which was to say more than could be easily provided.

I couldn’t always see so far ahead by moonlight and needed to consult the compass more often. It slowed things up to keep slipping it in and out of my jeans pocket so after a while I tucked it up the sleeve of my jersey. That improvement upset the old fifty-yard rhythm but it didn’t much matter. I looked at my watch instead and stopped every fifteen minutes for a rest.

The moon rose high in the sky and shone unfalteringly into the woods, a silver goddess that I felt like worshipping. I became numb again to discomfort to a useful degree and plodded on methodically taking continual bearings, breathing carefully, aiming performance just below capability so as to last out to the end.

The archer had to have a face.

If I could think straight, if every scrap of attention didn’t have to be focused on not falling, I could probably get nearer to knowing. Things had changed since the arrow. A whole lot of new factors had to be considered. I tripped over a root, half lost my balance, shoved the new factors into oblivion.

Slowly, slowly, I went north. Then one time when I put my hand in my sleeve to bring out the compass, it wasn’t there.

I’d dropped it.

I couldn’t go on without it. Had to go back. Doubted if I could find it in the undergrowth. I felt swamped with liquefying despair, weak enough for tears.

Get a bloody grip on things, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. Work it out.

I was facing north. If I turned precisely one hundred and eighty degrees I would be facing where I’d come from.

Elementary.

Think.

I stood and thought and made the panic recede until I could work out what to do, then I took my knife out of its sheath on my belt and carved an arrow in the bark of the tree I was facing. An arrow pointing skywards. I had arrows on the brain as well as through the lungs, I thought.

The tree arrow pointed north.

The compass had to be somewhere in sight of that arrow. I would have to crawl to have any hope of finding it.

I went down on my knees carefully and as carefully turned to face the other way, south. The tangle of brown foot-long dried grass and dead leaves and the leafless shoots of new growth filled every space between saplings and established trees. Even in daylight with every faculty at full steam it wouldn’t have been an easy search, and as things were it was abysmal.

I crawled a foot or two, casting about, trying to part the undergrowth, hoping desperate hopes. I looked back to the arrow on the tree, then crawled another foot. Nothing. Crawled another and another. Nothing. Crawled until I could see the arrow only because it was pale against the bark, and knew I was already further away than when I’d taken the last bearing.

I turned round and began to crawl back, still sweeping one hand at a time through the jumbled growth. Nothing. Nothing. Hope became a very thin commodity. Weakness was winning.

The compass had to be somewhere.

If I couldn’t find it I would have to wait for morning and steer north by my watch and the sun. If the sun shone. If I lasted that long. The cold of the night was deepening and I was weaker than I’d been when I set out.

I crawled in a fruitless search all the way back to the tree and then turned and crawled away again in a slightly different line, looking, looking, hope draining away yard by yard in progressive debility, resolution ebbing with failure.

One time when I turned to check on the arrow on the tree, I couldn’t see it. I no longer knew which way was north.

I stopped and slumped dazedly back on my heels, facing utter defeat.

Everything hurt unremittingly and I could no longer pretend I could ignore it. I was wounded to death and dying on my knees, scrabbling in dead grass, my time running out with the moonlight, shadows closing in.

I felt that I couldn’t endure any more. I had no will left. I had always believed that survival lay in the mind but now I knew there were things one couldn’t survive. One couldn’t survive unless one could believe one could, and belief had leaked out of me, gone with sweat and pain and weakness into the wind.