by Dick Francis
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, hopelessness 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 movement will hurt for the foreseeable future. Take that for granted. Go on from there.
Still on my knees, I edged around 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.
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 traveled 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, memorized 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 on to branches as on to 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 traveled 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. Marvelous. 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 rests 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 multipurpose 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 had to be 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 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 a
gain 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, semiasleep, 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 pulverizing 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 farther through. I’d done hell knew what extra damage in 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 like 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 on to 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 putting 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 worshiping. 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 skyward. 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 farther away than when I’d taken the last bearing.
I turned around 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 on 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, the 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.
18
Time ... unmeasured time ... slid away.
I moved in the end from discomfort, from stiffness: made a couple of circling shuffles on my knees, an unthought-out search for a nest to lie in, to die in, maybe.
I looked up and saw again the arrow cut into the tree. It hadn’t been and wasn’t far away, just out of sight behind a group of saplings.
Apathetically, I thought it of little use. The arrow pointed in the right direction, but ten feet past it, without the compass, which way was north?
The arrow on the tree pointed upwards.
I looked slowly in that direction, as if instructed. Looked upwards to the sky: and there, up there, glimpsed now and then between the moving boughs, was the constellation of the Great Bear ... and the polestar.
NO DOUBT FROM then on my route wasn’t as straight or as accurate as earlier, but at least I was moving. It wasn’t possible after all to curl up and surrender, not with an alternative. Clinging on to things, breathing little, inching a slow way forwards, I achieved again a sort of numbness to my basic state, and in looking upwards to the stars at every pause felt lighter and more disembodied than before.
Lightheaded, I dare say.
I looked at my watch and found it was after eleven o’clock, which mean
t nothing really. I couldn’t reach the road by half-past midnight. I didn’t know how long I’d wasted looking for the compass or for how long I’d knelt in capitulation. I didn’t know at what rate I was now traveling and no longer bothered to work it out. All that I was really clear about was that this time I would go on as long as my lungs and muscles would function. Survival or nothing. It was settled.
The face of the archer ...
In splinters of thought, unconnectedly, I began to look back over the past three weeks.
I thought of how I must seem to them, the people I’d grown to know.
The writer, a stranger, set down in their midst. A person with odd knowledge, odd skills, physically fit. Someone Tremayne trusted and wanted around. Someone who’d been in the right place a couple of times. Someone who threatened.
I thought of Angela Brickell’s death and of the attacks on Harry and me and it seemed that all three had had one purpose, which was to keep things as they were. They were designed not to achieve but to prevent.
One foot in front of the other ...
Faint little star, half hidden, revealed now and then by the wind; flickering pinpoint in a whirling galaxy, the prayer of navigators ... see me home.
Angela Brickell had probably been killed to close her mouth. Harry was to have died to cement his guilt. I wasn’t to be allowed to do what Fiona and Tremayne had both foretold, that I would find the truth for Doone.
They all expected too much of me.
Because of that expectation, I was half dead.
All guesses, I thought. All inferences. No actual objects that could prove guilt. No statements or admissions to go on, but only probability, only likelihood.
The archer had to be someone who knew I was going to go back for Gareth’s camera. It had to be someone who knew how to find the trail. It had to be someone who could follow instructions to make an effective bow and sharp arrows, who had time to lie in wait, who wanted me gone, who had a universe to lose.
The way information zoomed around Shellerton, anyone theoretically could have heard of the lost camera and the way to find it. On the other hand the boys’ expedition had occurred only yesterday ... dear God, only yesterday ... and if . . . when . . . I got back, I could find out for certain who had told who.