A Walking Guide

by Alan S. Cowell

  Up until now, the idea of losing his way had not been so terrifying for, with his checklists and his kit, he had been equipped to survive unscheduled delays on the mountains. But he no longer had that luxury. He had jettisoned most of the survival gear at Esk Hause as he prepared this crazy dash for the summit—if dash was not perhaps something of an overstatement. And he had not factored in weather like this dense, sightless, frozen murk that iced his two-day stubble and clogged his nostrils within the cowl of his parka pulled tight over his balaclava. So the imperative was to remain on course. To head for the summit. To ensure that one breath followed another.

  He had left no trace, no spoor. His disappearance bore no relation to the effusive protestations that preceded the tapping on her bedroom door, the fleet-foot tread of the villain on the deep-pile carpet of the boudoir. As the vodka-wine-cognac haze began to thin, the sequence of subsequent events began to reemerge in spectral outline. He had entered the suite, Joe Shelby’s unguarded citadel. They had spoken little. They had clinched and hugged and the outcome seemed predictable, certainly from her perspective. Somewhere, over dinner, a decision had been taken, a switch had been thrown. Her year’s error with Joe Shelby seemed no more than that—an aberration from which recovery was still possible provided she committed herself now through this sacrificial act of treachery. Whatever the outcome of Joe Shelby’s expedition—success or failure, life or death—she had made the decision for all of them.

  Then the frame slipped. At some advanced fumbling stage, the preordained sequences had been suspended. The event that should have happened had not, not because she had balked, but because Jeremy Davenport had begun muttering about having made his point, achieved his goal, scored enough of a victory bringing her to this point. Yet, she knew, that was not the true reason for this failed consummation. One probing brush of her fingers told her what had happened. Her harsh laughter had been involuntary, directed at her own stupidity in thinking that this single act of joining could erase all the pains and hurts and traumas. But he took it as directed at him, at his failure, his collapse in the final moment of his campaign. His departure had been raging, incoherent. She remembered it all quite clearly now as she drove to make contact with the rescue base station, feeling besmirched by failure, acknowledging to herself that Joe Shelby might be right, that truth could contain its own opposite, a mirror of appearance and reality.

  For much of her daily life, Angie Cartwright was a high-school math teacher and parent of a four-year-old daughter, Jemima, whose father had died in a rock-climbing accident three years earlier. For a very important portion of her life she was also deputy leader of the mountain rescue and team leader of one of its main rock and fell units. She had paramedic training to offer initial assistance in the event of trauma, hypothermia, frostbite, fractures, spinal and skull injuries. As a walker she had long since completed the Munros—the Scottish peaks over 3,000 feet. As a rock climber she had conquered classics on El Cap in Yosemite and on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo in the Italian Dolomites—until, of course, her husband’s death, after which she concluded that Jemima did not deserve two dead parents. But she had not given up the mountains and she had not given up the mountain rescue. When her husband died, he had been climbing solo in bad weather on the Central Buttress of Scafell Crag, opposite the summit of Scafell Pike across the broad, barren col known as Mickeldore. If a mountain rescue team had reached him, he might well have survived. But he had been foolish, overconfident, a supreme cragsman and brilliant technical climber, but a poor mountaineer who had never learned to guess the mood of the high ground or respect its caprices. He had told no one where he was going, probably because he knew people would have tried to dissuade him. As a result, the rescuers were not even alerted until the following day. By then, it was too late. He had died of exposure with both legs, three ribs and one arm broken, internal bleeding and severe lacerations to the skull. Angie Cartwright had led the team that found him, following her instinct to the boulders below Central Buttress.

  She did not know the man at Esk Hause, but she knew that men are foolish and put their egos and whims ahead of their families. She did not know whether this man had a family or not but she did know that, unless they looked for him on this day, the weather would take him as surely as a slip had slain her own husband. She was a short, wiry woman, perfectly proportioned, who looked faintly silly in her Michelin-man down jacket, but no one laughed at her. On the steep grind up to Esk Hause through Grains Gill she set a grueling pace that even the fittest of her team found hard to follow. She located the route unerringly despite the snow and the flurries that cut visibility to a matter of yards and hid the cairns that marked the route. At around the 1,700 foot contour, the trail narrowed, entering a sharp vee of ravine, becoming no more than a slender shelf on the steep hillside. She contemplated urging the team to rope up, but decided they were nimble and fit enough to negotiate this steep and hazardous stretch without extra safety precautions. Above her, the cloud broke for a fleeting second to reveal the ramparts of Great End, covered in a wedding-cake crust of snow and ice, white against the deep, black strips of the crag’s gullies that plummeted six hundred sheer feet from summit to base. Over the years, the trails in this region had become first eroded, then—as in many other places—repaired using flat rocks and boulders to create steep, uneven staircases winding to the heights, bearing aloft legions of fell walkers. Today they saw no one. Even late in the year, in normal weather, there would be enthusiasts—hardy spindly aficionados, sprightly grannies in bright fleeces—criss-crossing the mountains of the central massif, hailing one another, carrying sandwiches and thermos flasks of sweet, milky tea. Eerily, on this September morning, the fells were as bleak and deserted as they had ever been. In weather such as this, only the foolish or the ignorant would venture forth and she wondered which category best defined her team.

  Breasting the high point of Ruddy Gill, she barely paused to check the GPS before finding a bearing south-southeast that would take her surefootedly to the confusing plateau of Esk Hause at the junction of north-south and east-west trails over the high ground. She knew she was making for the wall shelter at 2,400 feet just below the top of the pass, but saw beyond it in a gap of cloud a brighter dash of color and broke into a stumbling jog, ploughing through the drifts with her team calling to her to slow down.

  “Hello! Hello, anybody there?” she was shouting at the bright ridge of Joe Shelby’s tent.

  Her team clustered round her. Obviously enough, it had simply been abandoned. The sleeping bag was inside out in a pile of other gear, a new-looking rucksack and packets of dehydrated food, a GPS satellite navigation aid that looked broken but needed only a new battery. There were spare socks, a toothbrush, bandages and liniment, a small notebook bound with elastic and laminated maps cut into squares. There was no stove, no warmth, no smell of human that might have suggested recent residence. She checked the name inside the notebook, just to be sure that it tallied with the name of her target, and it did.

  “Dead man’s kit,” one of the team muttered.

  “Don’t say that. We’ll make this base.”

  On a northwest heading, a little over one mile distant, Ken Gill and his team had settled around the prepositioned rescue trunk, throwing up bivouac shelters to keep the wind off stoves where they were making sugary tea to maintain their glucose and liquid levels. The rescue equipment, in a long coffin-like container emblazoned with the words “Stretcher Box,” offered a windbreak, diverting the gusts that rose on the breath of the clouds, up from Wasdale and over the summit of the pass, down, past the black triangle of Styhead Tarn where ice had begun to fringe the shoreline.

  “They found his tent,” he called to his team, crouching over his radio, out of the wind behind the rescue container.

  “Angie. Is the search target there? I repeat. Is the search target there?”

  “Negative, Ken. Repeat. Negative.”

  At Seathwaite, the older men clustered around the base station t
uned to the same frequency, intercepting the traffic between the two rescue teams. At first, they did not notice the woman in the heavy, black shearling coat. She had been standing at the door of the slate-and-granite barn where they had set up their station. They had erected a high radio mast and a portable satellite dish for backup. Across the way from the barn, twists of coal smoke trickled from the chimneys of a terrace of cottages behind low garden walls that made up most of the village. Everything was gray—the slate of the barn walls and the roofs, the cloud that fell down from the invisible mountains. Even the snowflakes seemed gray when she looked up to search for even a glimmer of brightness. Eva Kimberly had parked her car on the last stretch of the narrow lane leading into the hamlet. She had listened in to the radio exchange between Angie Cartwright and Ken Gill, then turned away, gnawing at bunched knuckles. Then, one of the base team saw her and went over to her.

  “You must be the wife,” he said, looking into red-rimmed hazel eyes set in a blanched face.

  “Sort of.”

  “We’ll be brewing a cuppa now.”

  “You’re very kind.”

  The discovery of the tent made the planning easier. Its presence, combined with what they knew of his schedule, meant that he had presumably been alive that morning. He had not been sighted by either of the two search teams heading up from Borrowdale, and Ken Gill radioed Langdale and Eskdale to inquire whether teams from either of those valleys could cover their approaches to Esk Hause. That left two principal options in the main search area. The man could be somewhere between the two search teams, between Esk Hause and Styhead. Or he could be somewhere on the Scafell massif itself. That was the tricky one. Ken Gill had no qualms about sending teams of four to reconnoiter the lower pathways. But he felt an instinctive aversion to the idea of risking his people on Scafell without at least some indication that they were not searching in vain.

  At Esk Hause, Angie Cartwright cast about for anything that might indicate the route the man had taken. She knew his itinerary would take him to Scafell Pike by the main, rocky ridge—a tricky assignment in these conditions, even for a trained climber. But since the morning, the snow had been falling steadily and there were no signs of footsteps, or the distinctive marks left by walking poles, to tell them whether he had decided to proceed according to plan or retreat, somehow. They did not know what kind of person he was, this Shelby, or whether he was in any way familiar with the terrain. Her radio crackled.

  “Base to Angie. Over.”

  “Base. This is Angie.”

  “Someone to talk to you. Stand by.”

  There was a pause. She thought it might be Jemima with a story about her drawing class. Or her mother just to let her know that her daughter was fine and not to worry. Instead it was a voice she did not know, a woman who said she was the lost man’s partner. Even over the radio, the woman spoke with the kind of upper-crusty tones that set Angie Cartwright’s nerves on edge—posh, privileged, self-aware, the kind of woman who drove a late-model car and, if she deigned to have children, would have nannies, too. But it was a voice that caught on the question of whether there was any sign of a man called Joe and that set Angie Cartwright to recalling what it was like to lose a man on the mountains.

  “I need to know more about him so I can try and work out where to look.”

  “Stubborn,” the voice on the radio said. “He never retreated in his job. He’s very brave. He knows the hills. He was a climber. He’s been over all of them before. They’re his history, in a way. He wants to write his own history. But you should know that he has a progressive illness. He desperately wants to get to the top before the illness makes it physically impossible. I think he’d rather die than fail at this stage.”

  “Thank you. That has been a great help,” Angie Cartwright said. What she was thinking was: so we can conclude that he went for broke, and now we have to find a cripple in a blizzard. There had been something else before she closed down the transmission, something about telling him if she found him that someone had said something that sounded like hold the mayo. But she put that down to atmospheric interference with the wireless signal.

  From Styhead, Ken Gill resolved to send one team straight for the summit via what they call the Corridor Route from Styhead to Lingmell Col, past the treacherous caverns of Piers Gill and Greta Gill, long ravines that scarred the mountainside like unhealed wounds. Angie would take another team—her best people on ice and snow with ropes and crampons and the full kit—across the main ridge. A third team would quarter the lumpy ground around Sprinkling Tarn, under the shadow of Great End, between Styhead and Esk Hause. And if they did not find him like that, then God help him.

  Barely north of Lancaster, Faria Duclos discovered that the rain had turned first to sleet and then to snow. In September? What kind of weather did the English have? Before driving out onto the A6 and then the A591, she had checked her route on a road map from the car rental agency. Kendal. Grasmere. Keswick. Borrowdale. Those were all places she recalled Joe Shelby talking about when he discussed his expedition with her. Borrowdale, he had said, was the final point of the journey, the point of arrival, triumph. If he reached Borrowdale, he would have achieved his goal. And how big could Borrowdale be? If she had been able to locate the hidden famines of Ethiopia and the great warrior of the Panjshir Valley in Afghanistan, then surely she could locate one single lover in one single, short English vale. The local news radio station was carrying a lead, breaking story that the mountain rescue had been called out following reports that a man was thought to have gone missing in the worst September weather on record. Faria Duclos thought that search might narrow hers too.

  She was driving on a winding road, through small settlements of bungalows and old cottages and cemeteries. The sandstone of the oldest houses had been weathered to a dark, grimy texture and the windows were narrow, set in thick walls to keep off weather and marauders. It was not her open, fecund Mediterranean environment, but there was a warmth to the kitchens espied through the snow flurries and the hearths where people drank tea. It was his land, his combination of closure and welcome, rejection and embrace.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  TAPE FIVE, SEGMENT ONE

  SEPTEMBER 16, 2000

  MONITORED SEPTEMBER 17

  Switched tapes, took photograph. Oh, yes. No making that mistake with the Kodak Vestpocket. Lost a glove. But got the photo. The summit photo, with the camera balanced on a rock and on self-timer and me standing there and on the summit and feeling deflated somehow because this was it and all I could imagine was getting down again. Because it’s the descent that gets you, really, in the knees and thighs, and most of all it’s balance. In this condition, balance is what trips you up. Of course. But like now when you are descending and I think I’m going the right way because the compass says northwest before you loop around, which is the route I’m on. But with one pole—did I mention that I lost the other, that and one glove? Well I did, lose them, that is—you can’t quite get the balance on these steep tricky narrow bits where there’s no going round the side or making your own way and you have to put the pole out like a blind man testing the ground and find some kind of purchase so you can use the pole as an extra limb. Easier with two. But I lost one. And it’s balance that’s the issue, not so much weakness per se. Because if you lose your balance you’re going to fall like I did back there on the boulder field and it’s only a matter of sheer chance or good fortune that I didn’t break a bone. On these limbs where the muscles are wasted you feel the bones too close to the skin. You feel they don’t have the covering and support you’d like them to have. So they’ll crack, like a whip. Crack and you’re down, gone finished because no one’s going to find you up here in this awful murk where you can’t see a damn thing. I mean there I was at the summit of Scafell Pike, at the highest point in England, and I couldn’t even see the summit cairn, which is as big as a house. But I knew I was there because there was no way up anymore. All paths led down and that was the miracle.
Finally to have achieved it. Praise God. Thank you, Lord. And no complaints. Take me now if you want me. Because I made it and that’s all.

  Trying now very hard to keep the left hand without the glove in a pocket but the arm is getting too weak to raise it and stick it into the pocket of the parka which thank the Lord is the top-of-the-range Arctic Everest model or otherwise I’d be frozen solid. And that leaves me with the right hand to hold the remaining pole and sort of crab with the extra limb on the right side but no support on the left. When I come to a junction in the paths I know I should turn right for Lingmell Col. Corridor Route. Styhead. But I did it and now that I have got my left hand in my pocket I find it’s empty which is very odd as this is the same left pocket as I put the camera in after the famous summit shots.

  —

  At Esk Hause Angie Cartwright had established an advanced base around the missing walker’s effects, which had been packed with the exception of his bivouac tent, now in use as a temporary shelter for as many of her team as could squeeze in out of the blizzard. Then Angie herself with three other climbers, one radio and two emergency packs had struck out from Esk Hause onto the ridge, ready with ropes and ice gear and in constant radio contact. The comms loop now linked base station in Seathwaite to Esk Hause and Styhead fixed positions and the mobile searchers making their initial probes. Ken Gill left just four members of his team at the Stretcher Box. Four would be enough to cope if the man somehow materialized. That left two units of six, one moving cautiously along and parallel to the Corridor Route—except of course for those stretches where it crossed ravines. The other he was leading up the main path heading southeast to Esk Hause in the gusting wind that turned the mini-waterfalls in the stream alongside the track into little maelstroms, blowing back up against themselves in defiance of the laws of gravity and the character of water. On a good day, he knew from many, many visits, his back would be to the huge, stalwart, broad flank of Great Gable with its pink-tinted scree runs and steep, frontal path. And above him, omnipresent, would be the dome of Great End. But this was not a good day. The trail made of boulders was icy and treacherous, slowing their pace. And where it was possible, they spread out—causing further delays—blowing whistles in the vain hope of hearing an answering blast. Past Sprinkling Tarn, he dispatched four searchers to circumvent the small sheet of dark water to look for any signs of a stray walker, a cripple, a man said to be determined but also sick. It was conceivable that, from Esk Hause, he might have chosen this route to descend towards Sty Head and safety. But it was equally possible that, having made that choice, he might have strayed over Seathwaite Fell and Aaron Crags. If Ken Gill admitted it to himself, many other things were possible, too—a fall on Great End, a slip into the abyss of Ruddy Gill. His team made slow progress because they were careful, because they did not want to have to revisit places unnecessarily when the search dug in for the long haul. Once he and his team met up with Angie Cartwright’s advance base in the abandoned tent at Esk Hause, they would take stock, reappraise the situation, consider their own options as the day wore on and the afternoon light began to weaken and falter. With ice forming already, the temperatures would only fall to some hideous depth, and with a wind buffeting the murk around them, sending the cloud hurrying like desperate legions, the chill factor would increase as the day wound towards night. This was not a place he wanted his team split and benighted.