The capture of Peter’s expedition by the soldiers

Peter’s expedition is captured by soldiers after a hidden forest snare catches the group and suspends them in a net. The capture ends their independent passage through the woods and brings them, under the soldiers’ protection, to a fortified garrison: a glimpse of the military world Peter had believed in without ever having seen.

The Snare in the Woods

The ambush begins with an incongruous sight above the travelers: dozens of long strands bearing small white objects hang from the branches in bunches. Alicia looks down instead, searching the leaf-covered ground. When she brushes the leaves aside, the concealed mechanism is already triggered. Peter hears the weight drop, and the net swallows the group before he can respond.

The snare lifts them, carries them briefly to the top of its arc, then drops them hard into a compressed, tangled mass. The travelers are caught together, unable to orient themselves or distinguish one body from another. Peter cannot reach his knife; even if he could, cutting the ropes would send the group falling. The net continues to swing and spin, leaving the captives unable to act as they try to understand what has happened.

Soldiers Reveal Themselves

As the net’s motion continues, Peter notices movement in the brush. A voice from below identifies the party as stragglers, and Peter sees that their captors are soldiers. That recognition changes the meaning of the encounter: the group has not simply stumbled into another hazard in the woods but has been caught by an organized force.

The capture also shifts the travelers’ position from self-directed expedition to guarded dependents. Their packs are later returned, but their weapons are withheld. They are not called prisoners, yet they are not free to go where they wish. Major Greer describes their condition as being under protection, a phrase that conveys both safety and constraint.

Under Protection

The soldiers march the group north from the river, over a ridge and toward a second valley. Their route reaches a muddy track marked by hoofprints and tire tracks, a sign of movement and transport that Peter and his companions had missed while traveling on their own. Clouds gather, rain begins, and Peter smells woodsmoke on the wind as they approach the garrison.

Greer leads a long-range patrol that has been in the woods for weeks. He is accompanied by fifteen men, dressed in camouflage and carrying equipment; like him, they have painted their faces with mud and charcoal. Their disciplined presence gives the encounter a larger frame: the captives have been found not by an isolated band but by a military unit operating in the forest.

The Garrison and Its Meaning

Greer’s remarks about the garrison are practical rather than reassuring: it resembles a large latrine, though it is better than being out in the rain. From a ridge, the group sees the installation below, nestled in a bowl-shaped valley. Canvas tents and vehicles stand within a tall timber palisade, its sharpened posts rising at least fifteen meters. Floodlights ring the perimeter; horses graze in a paddock, and soldiers move among the buildings and along the wall’s catwalk.

The garrison’s vehicles include at least six Humvees, two large tankers, and an assortment of smaller trucks and five-ton vehicles. At its center, a large red, white, and blue flag bearing a single white star flies over the compound. The settlement occupies less than half a square kilometer, but its scale feels greater to Peter: from the ridge, it appears to him like an entire city and the heart of a world he had always believed in but never actually imagined.

Michael’s brief observation that the garrison has lights underscores the contrast between the travelers’ uncertain movement through the forest and the organized infrastructure before them. The capture therefore functions as both a loss of freedom and an arrival at a possible refuge. The soldiers’ protection is conditional, their weapons remain withheld, and the garrison is a guarded enclave rather than an open return to ordinary life; nevertheless, it makes visible a military order that had previously existed for Peter more as belief than as lived reality.