Before the flirting I wanted to
find out more, stay at peace, keep the ceasefire active for a bit while I found
it in me to attack again. My need to
tame her was still as alive as ever but my confidence was shaken by those great
worms. So I took a day off work in the
week to do some reconnaissance - to try and discover something about this
unicorn to help with said proceedings.
Was she part of a herd, for instance?
where did she live, exactly? and
how old was she? was she still a foal or
was she fully grown?
I left my van with a rucksack
containing my lunch, some maps, biscuits and flasks of tea and coffee, and
headed for the clearing first. Here I
breaked for a spot of morning coffee - washing down some tasty biscuits, shortbread
I believe they were. Then I went in the
direction the unicorn normally left in and started looking for signs of
her. I hoped that she might have bumped
into some trees and/or left hairs in bushes after the ordeal with the quagmire…
though she had left in quite a calm manner so I knew it might be in vain. Quickly, however, I started to find these
signs - first on the trunk of a tree then in some thistles - she must have got
clear of me and started to run home. She
must have left restrained and dignified, not calm from shock. Excited, perhaps for the wrong reasons, I
kept on.
On past the holly, the ivy on the
willow by the stream, across whose rocks I slipped and stumbled toward the
oaks, up a hill of bracken toward the forest of tall trees I didn't recognise
but seemed familiar where I stopped for lunch: a scotch egg, turkey sandwiches,
smokey bacon crisps, fruit cake and a hazelnut yoghurt washed down with the
first half of my flask of tea. I would
remember this so well because, for a while, I thought it would be the last meal
I ever ate.
After lunch I continued onward
through the woods and until afternoon tea it went much as the morning had. Clues of hair and hoof prints by rocks, on
tree trunks, in bushes and so on appeared to me and onward I trudged. On and on I walked, happy I was getting
somewhere, that eventually I would see the unicorn herself.
And then, while drinking tea and
eating chocolate digestives, I realised I had eaten lunch in the same
spot. Five minutes later I went by a
disturbingly familiar oak. And then I
found my own tracks on a path through some undergrowth that I had made earlier
in the day. I was going in fucking
CIRCLES. Bugger. Well, it was just one circle at that point
but I was starting to panic and half an hour later I was back on bracken hill
for the frigging fourth time, shortly before slipping on the same damn stream
rocks for the third time, this time losing my balance and the maps I'd
forgotten I even had. Standing up
red-faced and soaked to the bone, I realised I was really in the shit now,
starting to picture myself half-friezing, half-starving to death or stumbling
into the web of a giant spider. And,
worse still, it was beginning it was to get dark. And I had no dinner, no way to get dry and no
night provisions. I began to scramble madly
about hoping to find some shelter, forgetting about the unicorn entirely and
starting to get paranoid over every sound that came rattling through the
trees. Naturally they were the same
sounds I'd been hearing all day and in the clearing for months but they sounded
pretty bloody fearsome by then, believe me.
Like lions and tigers and stuff.
So it was some relief when I found a cave. Inside I went, curled up and waited for
morning, too dejected and gloomy to do anything sensible. Content instead to shiver and bemoan my fate.
It was two hours before I noticed
the unicorn hair glittering at my foot, beside me and all round me. Two hours of jittering fear, uncontrollable
shuddering and flinching at every sound, every branch movement, every change in
the moonlight. The hair relaxed me
instantly and I soon found the mossy bed to fall asleep on.
Damn pity I didn't have enough
sense or wits about me to check further back in the cave because I woke up in
the back of my van, naked and wrapped in straw, my clothes drying out beside
me.
I guessed it was time to get back
to the games in our little amphitheatre, that was where my bread would be won,
after all, and forgot the whole episode for quite a long time.
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