I started keeping the tally on the fourth day, on the inside of my forearm, in blood, because we had nothing to write with and I have never claimed to be a reasonable man.
It began as a joke I was telling myself to stay awake.
Then it stopped being one.
He said he had been trying to go up for ten years. He is here. He said stay away from this area. He walked us into it. He said he did not ask to be trusted, and then he told us the one rule that kept the rest of us alive at the cost of nothing to himself.
He said he had no interest in the animal, and then he knelt in the dark with both hands over its stump until the heat went out of it. He said he would walk the back half of the line, and he was ahead, and a granary clerk is somewhere behind us in the dust.
He said eleven days. Then nine. Then a week. Then four.
By the fourth day I had eleven entries on my arm and not one of them went the way he had said it would.
'That is not madness. That is a pattern.'
