The Bearing

Original fiction extract written for Revision Library.

1 Yusuf Rahman had checked the compass bearing three times before Ms

2 Whitfield even blew the whistle for the group to set off, and he checked

3 it twice more before they had gone a hundred metres. Somewhere behind him

4 Connor was still grumbling about the weight of his rucksack, but Yusuf

5 barely heard him. Two months earlier, when their Duke of Edinburgh group

6 first pinned the route card to the noticeboard, the high moor section had

7 looked, on paper, like nothing more than a scribble of contour lines and a

8 single dotted path. Now, halfway through their second afternoon on the

9 expedition, it looked exactly the same, except that Yusuf was the one

10 meant to be reading it. The mist arrived without warning, the way Ms

11 Whitfield had told them it sometimes did up on the moor: not rolling in

12 from one direction, but simply thickening, as if someone were slowly

13 turning down the brightness on the whole world. One minute Yusuf could see

14 the ridge line ahead, a dark smudge against the sky; the next, he could

15 see perhaps twenty metres, and the wet ground beneath his boots had become

16 the only certain thing left. "Stop," called Priti, the group leader, and

17 everyone stopped at once, boots sinking slightly into the soft grass. She

18 crouched to check her ankle, which she had twisted stepping awkwardly over

19 a tussock a few paces back, and Yusuf saw, from the way her jaw tightened,

20 that it was worse than she was letting on. "I can still walk," Priti said,

21 though her voice had gone thin and careful. "Just slower than before.

22 You'll need to take the bearing from here, Yusuf. You're the only one of

23 us who's actually good at it." Yusuf did not feel good at it. He felt, in

24 that exact moment, like a boy who had memorised a method without ever

25 quite believing it would work when it truly mattered. He unfolded the map

26 with hands that were not entirely steady, found their last confirmed

27 position, a rocky outcrop they had passed some ten minutes before, and

28 laid the compass flat against the paper exactly as Ms Whitfield had

29 drilled into them for weeks: baseplate along the line of travel, housing

30 turned until north met north, whole body turned slowly until the red

31 needle sat neatly inside the shed. "Two hundred and thirty one degrees,"

32 he said at last, and the number sounded smaller and far less certain out

33 loud than it had inside his head. Nobody argued, mostly because nobody

34 else had any better idea, and that unsettled him more than if they had.

35 Yusuf picked a rock a short distance ahead, walked to it, checked the

36 bearing again, picked another rock, and kept going, pace by pace, refusing

37 to let himself think further ahead than the next visible landmark. The

38 mist did not lift. If anything it thickened further, muffling even the

39 sound of their boots, so that the six of them seemed to be walking through

40 a world with the volume turned almost all the way down. Every so often

41 Connor asked, in a voice trying hard to sound casual, whether they were

42 nearly there, and every time Yusuf said he thought so, without being

43 entirely sure it was true. It was the sound that reached them first: a

44 metallic clank, then a second clank, rhythmic and mechanical, utterly

45 unlike the wind. Yusuf almost laughed with relief. He knew that sound. Ms

46 Whitfield had told them, on the very first morning of the expedition, that

47 the emergency checkpoint had a flagpole with a loose clip that rattled

48 constantly in any breeze, "the ugliest, most useful sound on the entire

49 moor," they had called it, and there it was, exactly where his bearing had

50 said it would be, materialising out of the mist like something conjured

51 rather than calculated. Ms Whitfield strapped Priti's ankle at the

52 checkpoint while the others peeled off wet socks and passed round a bag of

53 biscuits that had gone slightly soft with the damp. Nobody made a fuss

54 about what Yusuf had done, which somehow made it feel more real than if

55 they had. He sat a little apart from the others for a moment, turning the

56 compass over and over in his hands, and understood something he had not

57 managed to explain to himself two months earlier, hunched over a route

58 card that had looked like nothing more than a scribble: a method only

59 becomes something you can trust once you have used it while frightened

60 enough to doubt it, not before.