Ken McClure: Eye of the raven

With a heavy heart, Steven looked at the road stretching over the moors and knew that he had more than four miles to go before he could alert anyone. In his present physical condition this represented as big a challenge as he’d ever faced. He’d be covering a great deal of the ground on his hands and knees because of the dizziness that still plagued him whenever he tried to stand up.

‘ Well, my son…’ he murmured as he reached the start of the single-track road, ‘as Chairman Mao once said… a journey of ten thousand miles… begins with but a single step. He had barely taken ten when it started to rain.

At first he found the rain refreshing. It felt cool after the heat of the fire and the water helped wash the mess of blood, sweat and earth from his face. He was very thirsty so he drank rainwater from pools that formed in holes in the road as the rain persisted. It tasted of mud but that didn’t matter.

After fifteen minutes however, he began to feel cold and started shivering. Four miles was beginning to seem like a journey to the ends of the earth. He hadn’t felt this bad physically since his early training days with the paras in the Welsh mountains when, having completed a particularly arduous exercise and reaching the end — as he had thought — an NCO had simply said, ‘Very good, Dunbar, let’s do it all again, shall we?’

Steven looked at his watch. He had trouble focusing but when he finally managed he saw that nearly an hour had gone by and he had covered less than a mile. He sank down on all fours and stared at the ground while rainwater dripped off his nose and chin. He was in trouble. The basic survival gear he had been carrying had all been in his rucksack and God knows what had happened to that.

He was concussed, soaked through and very cold. Night was falling and the temperature with it. He was close to complete exhaustion but still had a long way to go. He concentrated hard on one single thought. He had to keep moving. If he gave in and lost consciousness it was odds on he would never wake up. He would have escaped fire to die of hypothermia.

As time went by he tried to aid progress by singing dirty songs at the top of his voice. He had never been very good at remembering song lyrics so the lines tended to get mixed up — if not made up — as he went along. He was making a rhymeless mess of, The Ball of Kirriemuir, when he saw two lights coming towards him. At first he peered through the rain at them on all fours, not sure if he was hallucinating but then he heard the engine. He stood up unsteadily in the middle of the road waving his arms above his head and making largely unintelligible noises until the police Land Rover came to a halt.

‘ No very well-equipped for walking on the moors, are we sir?’

Steven managed a silly grin before passing out.

Later, in hospital, he discovered that the pilot of a light aircraft had reported seeing a large fire on the moors and the police had been sent to investigate. The officers had summoned a rescue helicopter which had taken Steven to hospital and possibly saved his life by avoiding any delay. He in turn was able to furnish the police with the registration number of Merton’s car and Merton was stopped and arrested at Dover some four hours later. Steven was discharged from hospital two days later and returned to London, none the worse for his ordeal, the local police having recovered his car for him. He called John Macmillan as soon as he got back.

‘ You know, Dunbar, you’re the reason our health service is in such a perilous state. You’re never out of hospital. You’re a tremendous drain on our resources, you know.’

‘ I’ll try to be more careful in future,’ said Steven. He liked John Macmillan but, at times, he found his sense of humour about as amusing as a heart attack.

‘ Seriously, you did a fine job.’

‘ Thanks,’ said Steven.

‘ I’ve warned Miss Roberts you’ll probably be wanting a few days off and quite right too.’

‘ Two weeks,’ said Steven flatly. ‘I’m having two weeks off.’

‘ Well, if you feel you must,’ said Macmillan.

Steven rang off. He called his sister-in-law in Dumfriesshire and asked if it would be all right for him to come up and stay for a bit. ‘I need to get away.’

‘ Mission accomplished?’ asked Sue.

‘ All over,’ said Steven.