You know how in a dream sometimes you know what you need to do? I mean there was never any moment when someone said "you need to eat that plant" or "you need to look under the stone" but there is this urgent, pressing need that is stronger than any instinct and you will go through anything to do it?
That's how the doe feels.
She needs to make it through the tunnel. It is a tunnel of feet and sharp hooves, attached to hundreds of Kimeti without faces, no one she knows, just an endless succession of limbs that are dedicated, it seems, solely to making her miserable. She is, at the moment, weighing whether the hard ringing blows that knock the wind out of her are better or worse than the glancing ones that split her skin. Her mind is somewhere else, floating away from her body, even when a particularly strong kick makes a cracking sound that even the doe knows is something breaking.
She has to finish the tunnel. She has to emerge from her journey between the two lines of angry hooves because somewhere there at the end there will be a hill, and from her high spot on the hill she will see something and she will learn something important. Not just important, but really Important, with a capital I; something she needs to know. So she keeps dragging herself past the punches.
At some point her legs give way, but to a doe like this one, on a mission this vital, that is no great handicap. She merely crawls instead, striking out with her forelegs and dragging her useless back half along. This seems to make the blows aim for her tender front, if indeed anything as intelligent as aiming can be ascribed to her assailants. They are mindless, as mindless as a thunderstorm or a heart attack, or so it seems to her. Her head reels back from a crack that blinds her for a moment, but she keeps moving. She tastes blood and is not sure whether it is running in from her face or out from her insides.
The crest of the hill is in sight now, when she can see it between washes of red and blackness, and with the same silence that has carried her through the entire ordeal she finally, finally, pulls herself past the final kick and pauses, just for a moment, to suck painful breaths in through her teeth. She must stand for this, and so she gathers her legs beneath her with an effort that defies mere vocabulary, and blinks the blood and sweat from her eyes and looks to see what lies over the hill.
Before her, opened like an inviting clearing between the trees, a path awaits her weary steps.
It leads down to a makeshift tunnel, a tunnel that runs between two lines of angry hooves. Beyond it, far beyond the corridor of pain, there is the crest of a hill.
So now she understands. And the doe moves forward.
