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.