A Great Divide

Ben Yellary to The Merrick

The Galloway Hills are deceptive. They are glacial, whale-backed, they merge in their foot-lands so walkers don’t quite know where one becomes another, which tuft of bog cotton or heather marks a boundary. Only men care for names and boundaries; these hills bear the names they were given long after they rose from the sea; their names meet the needs of men, not hills.

This day, a man and a woman drove to Glentrool and parked by the Bruce monument. They read the legend and shrugged. Hard to imagine men rolling boulders down the hillside onto soldiers below with any accuracy. Wouldn’t they just swerve out of the way? Wouldn’t they hear the crashing of stone on stone? Who’s to argue now — legends too, are deceptive. They looked up the hillside, tracking the foot-wide path with their eyes, reading the grey sky.

‘Mist,’ he said, not calling it cloud.

They cast a practised eye over the warning notice. They had waterproofs, food and thermos, map and compass and stout boots — and each other. They started to walk. Stones and gorse, rivulets and sheep dung, bracken and bog cotton passed under their feet and around them. Sheep turned their black faces towards them, pausing their chewing momentarily, before turning away. Mists rose and fell with fickle winds, sometimes reducing their world to the bubble of vision around them and the snaking path in front. He had the map on a string round his neck; she carried the compass. They didn’t speak but from time to time they put their heads together. She tapped the compass and he prodded the map, then they strode upward again.

At some height the mist stayed. In spite of the map and compass, a query weakened their firm walking. They seemed to be moving in a long curve alongside a scattered dry-stone dyke, but more downward than they expected.

‘Let’s stop for a moment,’ she said, stopping and slipping her rucksack off in one smooth movement. They uncapped a steaming thermos and drank from the plastic caps, willing the mist to lift, peering upwards to where the sun should be burning a hole through but it was from the side that the change came.

The mist that had been hanging still began to sway a little, then to sway faster, to turn from damp grey to silver white, to shred, roll over itself and finally, in a tearing movement disappeared in all directions.. The woman dropped her flask as the clear air revealed the thousand foot drop to Loch Enoch, a puddle of a loch, with a loch in a loch below. She grabbed the man, reeling with vertigo.

‘God,’ was all he said, swallowing hard. She felt him trembling.

They looked across the long saddle, the tumbled dyke like a spine along its steeply sloping flanks. Incredulous, they saw sheep on the sheer faces, hooves sounding like tap dancers among the scree. A buzzard mewed far below making a figure eight circuit of the lochside scrub. She stepped nearer the edge and felt her clothing blown, her face stretched by an invisible air stream rising from the cauldron of the space below. She laughed, unzipped her anorak and, holding the two fronts in cold fists, leaned over the drop where the constant air held her.

She heard his shout through the whooshing air.

‘Don’t !Don’t!’

She leant further until her heels left the ground, the soles of her feet digging into the ground, her anorak fronts flapping wildly, her arms angel wide. She sensed she was close to flight, like the wheeling buzzard below, and though she knew she could not fly, she thought that she might, just for one glorious moment, turn weightless in the strength of the wind if she could just surrender herself. Like in a trust game, she told herself, but without the game. A flicker in the wind’s energy made her stagger. She screamed but righted herself.

‘Come on — you too!’ she cried.

She heard his boots behind her, felt so close to him, about to share the air. Suddenly he was at her back, grabbing her waist and rolling backwards, pulling her to the ground.

‘You bloody fool!’ he murmured, holding her tight, ‘Whatever do you think you’re doing?’

She beat at his clenched hands but he would not let her go until she began to weep.

They ate their sandwiches and, polite as strangers, shared the last of the soup. They could think of nothing small enough to say. They were both raging inside. When she stood up he sprang to his feet and stood between her and the drop but she shrugged her lack of interest with a dismissive wave of her hand. Without conferring, they turned back and trudged with aching knees down the mountain, knowing they would not have the blazing row that might heal them, but would contemplate each other across a silent chasm from this moment on — she on the wild edge, he on the safe side. Engrossed, with the map of the hill on her lap, she did not feel the faint wumph as the car hit the buzzard, near invisible on the darkening road. He did not tell her, fearing she would read some portent into its final fluttering. In the darkness above, cloud draped itself over the saddle between the hill tops. She heard a buzzard cry for her mate and only half imagined that she did the same.