Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

I took a long, slow breath. I knew that within a few hours I was really going to start hurting and I’d be as stiff as a board, but I didn’t care. I was alive. I sat in the dark, behind the wheel, as if patiently waiting in a queue of traffic. It was weird. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch darkness and for a panicked moment wondered if I’d been blinded by a head injury. I ran my fingers over my face and through my hair. No blood. No lacerations. No duck egg bumps.

I felt around for the glove compartment, opening it to get some light into the cabin of the car, but none came on. The electrics must have been shot. I couldn’t find my penlight in my pocket and spent ten minutes fumbling around on the seat and the floor trying to find it, without success. It would be hours before daylight — a full night, in fact — and I couldn’t hang around till then. I decided to get out of the car, but the driver’s door was jammed tight in its twisted frame. I slid over and kicked the passenger door open and crawled out.

It didn’t do me much good. The only light was coming from the moon and stars, and even that was shaded by the brooding black shoulder of the hill above me. What I could see was that I hadn’t come that far: maybe twenty yards from the road, but most of that had been downwards. I stumbled about and moved to the front of the car. More from what I could feel rather than see, it became clear that my continued descent down the slope had been halted by a thicket of brush and tangled wood. I allowed myself a smile at the irony. I looked up at where the road was, most of my journey back to it hidden in the deepest shadow. It would be difficult enough to get back up in the daylight and there was no way I could make it in the dark. Anyway, I had all of my gear still in the car. There was nothing for it: I was going to have to spend the night in the car.

Somehow, without the aid of my penlight, I was able to open the boot and feel around for the sleeping bag. I took it into the back seat, shoving the scattered clothing onto the floor and, still wearing trousers, waterproofs and boots, climbed into it.

With my aches and pains, and with the adrenalin from the accident still coursing through my veins, I knew there was no way I would get to sleep.

As usual, I was wrong.

The sound of a car, up above on the single track road, woke me. By the time I was fully conscious, the engine sound was already fading into the distance. Not that it made much odds: there was no way I could flag down a motorist and cadge a lift.

The pain from being buffeted about in the crash was now localized — to the space between my toenails and the top of my skull. Just like the night before, everything hurt. It just hurt more. I took a minute to gather my senses, then unzipped myself from the sleeping bag and crawled out. The grey morning outside nipped at my hands and face as soon as I got out of the car. The sky was clear, but the morning was still busying itself with the uplands, and would take some time before getting down here. Still, I had a good view all around me. Looking up to the road, I could see where the car had dropped a good five feet before careering down the steep slope, leaving a scar where it had scored through the thin layer of earth that covered the rock. I blessed the five-foot drop for not being a fifty-foot drop, which it would have been if I had come off the road around the corner.

The Cresta had plunged through one thicket and into a second. I worked out that it would be difficult to see from the road, but I would have to get back up there before I could see for sure. The one thing I didn’t want was someone knocking on McBride’s door and telling him that his car had been found trashed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. I knew he would never give me up deliberately, but Twinkle was Twinkle and didn’t sparkle the brightest.

It took me a good half hour to collect all of the stuff from the car, roll up the sleeping bag and pack everything into the rucksack. The only thing I couldn’t fit in was the bivouac, but I lashed that to the back of the rucksack. All in all, with the anorak, the backpack and the professional mountain gear, I would really look the part of the serious mountain rambler. Given that it was November and freezing, it was probably more the part of the seriously deranged mountain rambler.

I decided to get the lay of the land. Leaving my pack by the car, I tried to find my way through the tangle of branches the Cresta had become caught up in. I couldn’t, so I edged my way along it and stepped around the side.

Instinct, that strange old thing the nature of which I had debated, saved me. As soon as I felt the ground go from beneath my feet, I grabbed two fistfuls of branch. My feet scrabbled on the loose gravel, trying to get purchase and get me back from the edge of the cliff that dropped below me.

Scrambling back from the edge, I dropped down onto my backside, that good old instinct telling me to get as much of my body as possible in contact with solid ground, as soon as possible.

When I got my breath back, I inched forward again and peered down into the gully. Thirty feet below me, a river frothed angrily over rock as it surged along the valley bottom. I turned to look along the length of the cliff edge: the bonnet of the Cresta, projected over the edge by a few inches where it had burst through the tangle of bush, root and branch.

I had just slept through the night, like a baby, in a car being held back from a deadly plunge by a mess of dead vegetation. I suddenly felt sick and started to shake, as if the realization had triggered the delayed shock of the crash.

I stayed where I was, sitting on the cold, frosty earth, took the pack from the bib pocket of the anorak, lit a cigarette and smoked it to calm my nerves.

Then I smoked a couple more.

There was no point in trying to get back up to the road at that point. In fact, it was probably a bad idea to be visible, even if the chances of a car or truck passing were remote.

Instead, I decided to walk along the shelf edge that ran parallel to the road, but was low enough down for me to keep out of sight. Checking Ellis’s map before setting out, I reckoned I hadn’t that far to go, and the walking, while rocky, wasn’t that arduous.

I had guessed that the shelf I was walking along would eventually come up to the road level, but it didn’t, instead declining sharply into the valley bottom. After half-an-hour’s walk, I found myself at the river’s edge. I took the opportunity to fill a billycan and heat it on the small gas stove, tossing in some loose tea. I sat watching the river while I drank the tea. The odd thing was that, because of what I was wearing and the body heat from my exertions being trapped in their layers, I didn’t feel at all cold other than on my cheeks — and my hands, whenever I removed my gloves. I looked around me at the heather-dressed mountains whose hues changed constantly, depending on the light and the occasional passing shadow of a cloud in the unforgivingly cold, blue sky.

There was no denying it. Scotland could be breathtakingly beautiful.

But so could Cape Breton Island or British Columbia. I rinsed out the billycan, packed up my gear and headed onward.

Despite it being a tiny mark on the map, there was a lot of give and take in the area it indicated, but eventually I caught sight of a pale grey wisp of smoke rising from some kind of settlement up ahead. The valley floor had been rising for some time and I guessed that the handful of houses indicated on the map at the head of the valley were the source of the smoke.

I found my way up the side of the mountain on the far side from the road and walked along a ridge, approaching the village from what I hoped would be an unconventional and unexpected direction. But the ridge became a path that again started to take me up the mountainside and away from my target and I realized I would have to retrace my steps. I changed my mind when I saw what I thought was an abandoned croft. It would give me a good view of the settlement, I guessed, so I headed for it.