The Figures
I have kept the incident log for the Upper Duncastle Fell Rescue Association for twenty-two years. It is not the glamorous job. I make the tea, I mind the radio, and when someone goes down on the high ground I write down where, and how far, and what was broken, and who carried them.
The Harrow Slack is a shoulder of loose stone running from the col below Duncastle Pike down to the tarn. Three hundred metres of scree at thirty-five degrees. The worst walking in the county, and the figures for it have never made sense.
14 Aug 1997 — runner, male, 33. Fell approx. 60 m on the upper pitch. Injuries: none recorded. Gravel packed into a sleeve wound, superficial. Transport: walked down unaided.
2 Feb 2009 — walker, female, 51. Slipped on frozen scree, mid-Slack. Injuries: bruising to the left hip. Boot found full of stone dust on arrival at the road. Transport: walked down unaided.
30 Oct 2019 — party of four, came off the path in fog below the fence line. Injuries: one sprained wrist between four people. Transport: unaided.
Ninety-three years without a death. The county as a whole loses a walker a year, and the Slack takes more falls than any other ground in it, so either the figures were wrong or the ground was, and the figures were mine.
In November the council votes on re-routing the path around the Slack. My job before then was simple: make the numbers tidy enough that people could trust them at a public meeting.
Soft Ground
My first live one came in June, watched from the lower pitch. A runner came off the skyline too fast, hit the scree at the top of the pitch, and went. The sound was right — that wash of stone a slope makes when it takes a body, rattling away downhill for the better part of a minute.
It stopped a beat early. Halfway down, the wash closed around him and went quiet, the way a struck piano string goes quiet when you lay a hand on it.
He sat up already slow. Flexed the ankle. Stood, picked his way down the last pitch on his own feet, and at the road his only injury was a gashed forearm where a flake had caught him — with the gravel packed into the cut in layers, coarse under fine, the way a nurse dresses a burn.
“Soft ground,” he said. “Lucky.”
That ground is not soft. I have forty years of it in my knees. What it was, for the length of his fall, was attentive.
Wat Crake would say I was slow to catch on. Wat is eighty-one, and he has been caught six times since 1961, and his file is the thickest in the drawer. Fell at seven onto the mid pitch in ’64, taking a wall gate down with him. Buried to the hip in the January of ’77. Over the fence in a hailstorm in ’89 with a shoulder that dislocated on impact and came right again before the team reached him.
The cottage hospital X-rayed that shoulder in 2010 and rang him back for a second film, because his humerus wears a collar of gravel fused into the bone, laid down in fine laminations like the rings of a tree. They asked which road accident. Wat has never driven.
He cannot feel rain on his left side. He sleeps with that arm out of the blanket in January. And every week, weather or no, he climbs to the mid pitch and sits a while with his flask, the way a man keeps a standing appointment.
“It’s never let me break,” he told me, at his kitchen table, his dead wife’s sheepdog asleep against his good boot. “Not once in sixty year. It’s seen me down every time. It’ll see me down the last time, and that’s a comfort, lass.”
Every faller I traced came back with more stone in them than the fall could account for. And every one of them kept going back up.
Soft Tissue
Wind, I decided. The figures still needed a mechanism, and a gust funnelling over the col could drop a body onto damping ground — or so I wrote to the council engineer, and asked for an anemometer to prove it.
I strapped it to the fence post above the Slack myself, on a wet Tuesday in September, because the young ones were all at work and the fence is only twenty minutes off the path. Coming down, on the pitch below the fence, my feet went.
The rattle moved around me. Not under — around, the way a stream parts for a stone and closes again behind it. Then the slope took my weight and held it, and through the seat of my waterproofs came a warmth like a wall heated from the far side, steady, radiating up out of the ground.
I took one breath in.
The radio was crackling my name when I came back to myself, and its clock said forty minutes of one held breath had gone by. My boot, unlaced at the road, was full of gravel — packed in layers, coarse under fine, sorted, the way you would pack a wound. My twisted ankle made no complaint at all. At the cottage hospital they found calcific deposition around the joint, told me to keep it dry, and asked how old the injury was. I said I didn’t know. That much is true. I never had one before.
The log entry for that afternoon reads: female, 58, slipped on wet ground, soft tissue only. Transport: self. The figures stayed tidy. I had made them wrong, and I knew both things in the same pen-stroke.
The Cairns
The October sweep came with a fog that lifted at noon, all at once, and the Slack stood out whole in the low sun for the first time since spring.
The club’s records list eleven cairns on the Harrow Slack, built by the 1970 committee as navigation marks along the line of the path.
I counted thirty-one.
They stand below the line of travel, in the fall-shadow, where no committee builds anything. Each has something leant against it. A stick. A coil of fencing wire. A tin mug. And on the newest, at the top of the mid pitch, a coat — a team-issue jacket from the 1974 pattern, sun-bleached green, the arms not empty.
Wat Crake has not come down since March.
I stood a long while with my clipboard, and then I did my job, and counted them again, and wrote the number down, because that is what I am for. The Slack does not let anything break on it. It catches what falls, and it keeps what it catches, and it looks after what it keeps the only way ground knows how to look after anything. Stone is how it mends. On its own clock — the clock of talus creeping a hand’s width downhill in a decade, of frost settling into a joint — a person is simply a thing it can go on making safer. Indefinitely.
The archive room holds sixty years of survey maps. The new cairns appear on them one at a time, decade by decade, always in the fall-shadow, always unexplained, always left standing.
The vote passed in November. The path goes the long way round by the col now, the Slack is off the map, and the figures are tidy. They were never wrong, as it turns out. Only unexplained, and now they are explained, and nobody has to read the explanation but me.
I still take the sweeps. Somebody must count the cairns, and the young ones ask the wrong questions.
The pen makes a sound when I press, like a spoon stirred in a cup of gravel. I write smaller than I did. My left hand has stopped feeling cold, and stopped feeling the rain, and I sleep with that arm out of the blanket now, because the weight of cloth on it is the one thing it still objects to.
Nothing has ever died on the Harrow Slack. I do the figures myself, up at the bench below the summit cairns, where the stone holds the day’s warmth longest of anywhere on the fell.
It has never let me break. It has seen me down every time. It will see me down the last time, and that is a comfort.
Read to the end. Some stories shouldn't be left unfinished.