The Hunting Party

by Lucy Foley

wanting wilderness, but secretly expecting the luxury of the hotels they’re used to staying in.

Usually, in Doug’s opinion, they are the ones who have the most problems with themselves. Remove all of the distractions, and here, in the silence and solitude, the demons they have kept at bay catch up with them.

They’re so used to having that invisible safety net around them in their normal lives—connectivity, rapid emergency services, health and safety guidelines—that they assume they carry it around with them everywhere.

Sometimes I genuinely believe that Miranda has known me for so long that somewhere along the way she might have acquired the ability to read my mind, if she looks hard enough.

Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters.

It is always a shock—a profound, existential shock—to be confronted with the inanimate object that was once a person.

That however much I think I have changed, however different I feel as a person at work, or with the few non-university friends I have, at times like this I somehow return to exactly the same person I was more than a decade ago.

Perhaps it’s simply growing older. A sense that she doesn’t need to prove herself any longer, that she knows exactly who she is. I envy that.

For someone who was once told at school that he had “an unfortunate lack of imagination” his brain seems to conjure a fair amount from thin air these days.

And most people don’t realize how much more they have than they need. They are lazy, and greedy, and blind to how easy their lives are. Perhaps it isn’t their fault. Perhaps they merely haven’t had the opportunity to see how fragile their grip on happiness is.

And being around people—people carrying on with their lives, busy and messy, settling down, having children, getting married—just emphasizes how much my own has stalled, indefinitely. Perhaps forever.

There is something lethal-looking about just the shape of the weapons, as though they could somehow kill you without ever being fired.

We reminisced about Oxford, how easy life had been then, even though, back then, we thought we were working the hardest we would ever work in our lives.