The Reservoir Tapes

*

The walk that day was a Butterfly Safari, which was always popular. A full seventeen people turned up, including a party of Girl Guides and their leader. The forecast was good, and the weather when they set off from the visitor centre was still and fair.

The first part of the walk was straightforward enough, although as always there were those who struggled. The climb up the track towards Black Bull Rocks could be thought steepish if you weren’t used to it, and the Girl Guides were carrying a full set of camping gear each, for some reason. They swayed as they walked, with the weight. The chatter and giggles soon died down, and they were left with the tapping of Vijay’s walking poles. The ground was hard – it had been dry for weeks, after a month of heavy rains, which turned out to be relevant, later – and the dust kicked up around their boots.

Graham took the opportunity to tell the group a little more about where they’d be walking and which species they might see. The heather beds they would pass were good feeding grounds for Common Blues and Small Coppers, and the knapweeds around the old mine workings were regular haunts for Painted Ladies. He told them a little about the industrial heritage: mines, quarries, the modern cement works. It’s important not to see this as any kind of unspoilt, ‘natural’ environment, he said. There’s plenty of nature here, but there’s nothing natural about the landscape.

As always, people’s attention started to drift.

They came over the top of the hill and set out along the ridge, and the noise level rose again. The Girl Guides lagged behind quite early on, stooping under their heavy loads.

Graham and Vijay fell into conversation, which Graham didn’t always welcome. Vijay sometimes took an excessive interest in Graham’s personal life. There was a colleague he’d been working closely with, and Vijay had found it hard to believe there was no romantic involvement. There had been a lot of speculation, mostly wide of the mark. But he was less interested in it that day, thankfully. He had a new pair of walking trousers and was keen to discuss them. Graham said he didn’t need to know about the wicking properties, and had no interest at all in the problem of chafing. He was a little sharp, perhaps, and Vijay took the lead for a while, opening up quite a distance between them. The two of them had these fallings-out from time to time, but they never lasted long.

They’d been crossing the flat stretch of moor-top known as Black Bull Bottoms, beyond Black Bull Rocks. It was always a bit of a slog. There was no real path as such, just a rutted cutting through the peat, waymarked by piles of gritstone slabs every few hundred yards. Vijay had stretched the distance between them to two waymarks when the hazy heat of the afternoon thickened quite suddenly to a rolling milky mist. Graham waited for the party to regroup. Once they’d caught up he did a quick headcount and carried on, asking the group to remain within sight. He had to slow his pace considerably, and it took longer than might have been hoped to reach the fence-line, where Vijay was waiting for them with news of an Essex Skipper which had only just moved on. Graham hadn’t seen an Essex Skipper up here for two years, and asked Vijay if it was a confirmed sighting.

Confirmed in what way, do you mean? Vijay asked.

Confirmed as in you’re confident of the identification, Graham said.

Vijay looked at him steadily. Yes, Graham, that’s confirmed, he said.

At this point it became clear that the party of Girl Guides was one short. There was quite a flurry of reaction. The Guide leader was not as calm as could have been hoped, and the other girls became hysterical. One of them went running off into the mist, and had to be caught and brought back.

Later it was realised that the girl had already been missing when Graham had done his first headcount. He may have skated over this fact in the incident report. It didn’t seem important, in the run of things.

One of the positives that Graham chose to take from the events of that day was the calm and methodical way with which he and Vijay responded to the crisis. Vijay led the rest of the group down to the road to contact Mountain Rescue, while Graham and some of the other adults retraced their steps.

They fanned out on either side of the track, keeping within sight of each other, and called the girl’s name at regular intervals. Graham’s assumption was that she’d simply lagged behind and drifted away from the route. It seemed unlikely that she could have got far, with the weight she was carrying. But the visibility was still very poor. It was hard

walking, away from the track. There were unexpected ditches and holes, and despite the dry period there were still areas of sodden ground which could suck a boot right off. In the mist the girl’s name sounded muffled and thin. Graham could hear little more than his own footsteps, and his ragged breathing.

It was important not to panic.

He heard a whistle, and told the others to stop. The silence was lengthy and the mist seemed to thicken while they waited.

He heard the whistle again. They all did, and the Guide leader called the girl’s name.

When they found her it wasn’t where Graham would have expected. As it was they walked straight past her twice, calling her name and pausing to listen again, and by the time they got to her she was in some distress.

Graham left the Guide leader with her for reassurance, and went to fetch help. Keep talking to her, he said; keep her awake. It was pleasing how easily he remembered the material from his training course. He made swift progress to the fence-line, and then down to the road where Vijay had already made the necessary calls.

*

When the Mountain Rescue people arrived they were brisk. They had all manner of equipment with them and they moved quickly up the hill. The Jackson boys were among them. Graham considered himself fit but he had trouble keeping up. They asked questions about the location and condition of the casualty. They expressed surprise that he had brought a group across the top in this weather, and he said it had been clear when they’d set out. It’s always clear when you set out, Will Jackson said.

Graham felt the sharpness was uncalled for, but he let it go. It doesn’t matter how much training or experience you have; if people have lived here longer they always think they know better. And no one had lived here longer than the Jackson family.

He led them along the path. After ten minutes they saw the torchlight he’d asked the Guide leader to flash, and they tacked off across the heather. Graham warned them to watch their step. One of them rather sarcastically thanked him for the advice. Graham took umbrage at the sarcasm, and perhaps this was why he hadn’t yet explained the danger when the team leader came very close to falling twenty feet into the sinkhole where the girl was lying. One of his colleagues more or less pulled him back out of thin air.

Graham was no geologist, but it seemed that the prolonged dry spell, following months of rain, had caused a sort of rupture between different layers of peat, those layers shifting and opening up a deep crevasse, hidden by the tussocks of bog-grass. The girl had wandered away from the main path and simply stepped straight into the hole. She didn’t appear to be injured. It seemed likely that her backpack had absorbed some of the fall.

It was never clear, later, how long she’d been down there when they found her. It was believed she’d lost consciousness for a time, coming round in the pitch dark on a bed of soft wet peat. If she hadn’t had the presence of mind to start blowing the emergency whistle it was hard to believe they would have found her at all. She would have still been down there now.

The mist started to clear, the sun burning suddenly through the last of it and the views opening up all around them. Graham was reminded why he loved walking in this landscape so much. The flat heather moorland was featureless to the untrained eye, but in fact was teeming with detail: the bilberries and bog-grasses, the mosses and moths and butterflies, the birds nesting in scoops and scrapes, the bog water shining in the late-afternoon sun. The warmth was rising from the ground already, the sky a rich blue above the reservoirs in the distance. A hundred yards away, a mountain hare broke from cover and thundered across the heather.

The team hauled the girl back up to the surface on a stretcher, and as she came into the sharp light of the afternoon she squinted suddenly against the glare.

The first-aiders gathered around her, checking her condition before the long trek down the hill. Graham watched them get on with their work.