The Black Loch of the Beast

Short story about winter climbing in Scotland [2500 words, 12 min]

Every two or three months, I’m going to insert a short story into the essay stream. Normal non-fictional service will resume next week with a post about the granite tors of Dartmoor and the Cairngorms.

It's that day in the year when Autumn rolls down off the edge of the moors, rolls downhill in grey low clouds like retreating waves of the sea, to lie like tide drift across the green fields and the shore. While here at the Black Loch all at once it is winter.

As the sun comes up, every small stone around the loch has its little fringe of ice. Beyond the water, between the angular rocks left behind by the glacier, the first snow lies across the gravel ground. The sea shines to its silver line along the horizon, and the grey, pale islands move in slow procession along the lower edge of the sky.

I sit beside the Black Loch in sunlight that's thin honey mixed with water from the spring. I'm combing out my hair, and the black threads drift across the water, drift like the dead insects of the end of the autumn.

When I look up, at the corrie edge beyond the loch there is a person. Black, a tiny figure against the brown moorland. As he walks down towards the loch I lose sight of him against the deer-moss and stones; but then, as he stops at the shoreline, I see his reflection below him in the loch.

He's looking across the loch, looking high behind me at the tiers of blood-coloured sandstone and the black gullies and the snow ridge up against the sky.

I wait for his companion, but no companion crosses the corrie rim behind him. Or her? No, this one walks like a male person, looking at the crags, ignoring his own feet on the stones and the thin new snow. As he comes closer, he is broad across the shoulders, tall, just entering the brief years of his middle age. Dark skin, tight dark hair, a jacket in some plastic material that rustles as he walks. Across his shoulders he carries the rope that climbers use.

He sees me now, hesitates – will he walk on past me? Almost he does, but no, he comes across the stones. His eyes are brown, his beard – yes, this is a male person – just touched with grey around the lips. He stands, not close, ten steps away, to talk in the quiet, cold air of the first day of winter, here beside the Black Loch of the Beast. He nods his head, twice, almost as if he'd expected to see me. He does not smile.

"You come to climb the Beast Slock?" It's where he's been looking, looking up across the loch at the great hollow of jammed boulders and ice and grey-green moss and sandstone the colour of dried blood.

"The north-east gully," he says. "Yes, the Beast Slock." His voice is low pitched, almost too quiet to hear.

I lower my voice, so as to force him to approach closer. "You know what happens to people when they climb the Beast Slock?"

Yes, he's spoken with the Mountain Rescue down at the village. And now I see the iceaxe that he carries, grey worn metal, its shaft of old ashwood. I stand up, and I reach to put my fingers on it, careful not to touch the metal at its head. The ash-tree wood is warm with the touch of hands. "I thought you had different axes now. Bent axes with jagged teeth?"

For I have seen them as they walk through the corrie to the rockwall and the ice, the metal tools bent like the necks of diving birds, toothed like the beaks of the goosander ducks that nest around the Black Loch.

Yes, he says, this is his grandfather's old iceaxe.

It's not close-cropped hair, it's a head-covering or helmet, strands of melted sand-rock set within some glue not made of bones or blood. A second helmet, pale clear blue like the winter sky, hangs from the sack behind him.

The climber's face and his hands are brown like the bog oak that lies among the peat. I look at him and I remember, I see again that grandfather, in the faded yellow anorak and patched breeches, his heavy ox-leather boots with the metal nails in the soles and the iceaxe with its ashwood shaft. Not wide shouldered like this climber in front of me now, a small man, tough like heather roots, who walked around the Black Loch with his eyes upwards to the brown curve of the Beast's Slock. And I saw again his ochre-coloured anorak as he fell through grey air and spindrift snow, falling from above the cave pitch. There'd been plenty of snow that year, drifted across the foot of the gully. The grandfather got away with a broken leg. Allowed me to set it for him, bound it with moss and splinted with the ashwood ice axe, before he dragged away like a seal, leaving a seal trail through the snow and over the corrie edge.

I speak to this climber again. "Alone, even with this fine iceaxe, you would not climb alive to the top of the Beast Slock."

"Well," he says to me. "Maybe that's not entirely the idea." His brown eyes look up to the brown rocks and the ice.

His foot in its lumpy plastic boot is beside the paw of the old dog fox. The ravens have taken the small bones of the fox, but under the flecks of snow the ribcage gleams in the low sun, gleams the same flat grey as the bars of cloud along the horizon above the sea. Two winters ago, or maybe four, I followed the fox, walked in his footprints along the high ridge, cloud pressing on my head like a memory of the dead, and the sea below me flat and grey. I followed the fox until at the ridge end, a flurry of footprints in the snow, and the marks of a claw, and a sweep in the snow where a great brown wing had brushed it; just two spots of bright blood to show where the great bird had jolted the dog-fox off the ridge and down into the green corrie below.

I look up at the dark eyes of the climber, brown like a peatpool among the moss. "The Beast Slock, I will climb with you. You have a rope. I'll climb. I'm going that way, up as far as the cave pitch."

The climber looks down at my leather sandals, my feet in the sandals as white as the flecks of snow. "Do you have an axe?"

I hold out the antler I brought from the bog in the spring time, and the small dagger made of bone. "And you have a spare helmet as well." The blue climbing helmet, blue like the sky, dangling behind him. And the rope. He is alone, why is he carrying rope?

He looks at me, his eyes blank as a frozen pool. Looks at the rope as if he's only just noticed it. "You can't have that helmet. Anyway, it's broken." And yes, the helmet is cracked across, a starburst of shards where it has struck against a rock or a rock has struck against the helmet.

We walk away from the Black Loch, walk past the bones of the dog-fox and up the slope of stones. Up into winter as the walls of brown rock rise around us and close in, and snow which is not yet winter-hardened so that we kick into it with our toes up to where the rock steepens.

Grey-white ice coats the rock, the brown rock itself and the summer moss faded under the ice like memories of summer days. His plastic boots lack nails, he stops to strap on spikes of pale grey metal. Behind us, the winter gully runs down to the loch where the ice makes crisp collars around every stone, and below the corrie the moors of peat where it is still autumn and below the moors the sea, the sea which has no seasons but is always only itself. We move up on the icy slabs, the moss in the ice making rough places for our feet. As the rock walls close in, he uncoils the rope and I knot it around myself, the smooth, bright coloured rope that under my fingers is new as next spring and also older than stories, boiled from the green life that died deep, deep below the ocean in time before the Gods.

The climber is placing our protection with real care, inserting pieces of shaped, grey metal into cracks of the rocks. I have to unrope each time I came to one of them, not to touch the metal with my fingers. He doesn't look back, doesn't notice that I'm leaving his little bits of metal behind us on the climb. For me it is easy now to see this climber: his life, and the end of his life, strung up across the brown overhang of the Beast's Slock, here above the Black Loch where his grandfather has fallen from the rocks. "The one with the blue helmet," I say. "The one who died. Your partner of the climbing rope."

He doesn't turn round, so that it's as if he speaks only to the grey ice and the rocks. "It wasn't my fault. A running belay, the rope jammed. It was easy ground, she untied from the rope to release it. And she fell."

In the silence, the chip of his iceaxe echoes in little clicks off the two walls of rock, the rock to left of us and the rock to right. Pieces of ice slide past me down the rock slabs. He is slow cutting the steps in the ice, the grandfather has been more accomplished.

"It was my fault. Of course it was."

•••

We climb. Fine snow drifts past us, drifts down the air like spring time under the wild apple trees. The climber's metal foot-spikes scratch on the ice. Above, now, the green-black hollow, ringed with icicles. The brown rock bulging above it, a thundercloud of brown, solid stone. Around the overhang the snow curls in, eddies. Above, the brown rock. The rock where the grandfather fell, to land in drifts of late winter snow.

No drifted snow today, just the small scree and the rocks left by the glacier. I say: "It's a jammed boulder. Just a boulder. We can go below it, the gap below the overhang."

He looks at me, his body twisted around on the ice, his hand on the steel head of the iceaxe. Above him the red-brown bulge of the overhang. The moss, the ice, the spindrift blowing across the gully, drifting down the rock, gathering in damp patches on the less sloping places.

The snow swirls into a new pattern, and  I see again the young man those years ago, the grandfather, the small man with his faded anorak and his long wooden iceaxe. His nailed boots sliding down the brown rock, scraping through moss and then falling free, flakes of ice falling around him, flakes of moss that drifted up behind. Then the light shifted, and I saw the same iceaxe flying out of another hand, this climber now with his broad shoulders and his spiked metal crampons, the dark helmet against grey sky and pale snowdrift as his body turned in the air.

The snow moves in the same curve as the long, falling cry of the curlew, as the slow waves of the sea. And now it's another figure, a helmet bright as the sky, pale hair streaming behind her. She falls through sunlight in another place, a place beyond the sea where the mountain ridge above her is notched and jagged like the ice on the Black Loch when it lifts and breaks in the spring.

So many climbers. So short their time upon the rocks, they climb into the sky and fall like leaves of autumn, they fall like the fox clawed off the clifftop. Three steps above me, the climber has stood so long that snow is lying on his hand, snow on his coloured glove where he holds the head of his ice axe. And I say again: "You don't have to do this. We can go through, through below the large rocks."

He turns and looks at me now, as if seeing for the first time; in his eyes are the falling climbers and the swirl of the snow. He coils the rope around his shoulders, and stoops into the hollow below the overhang, brushing aside the ice for his wide shoulders to pass.

And so we climb into the darkness below the jammed boulder of the overhang. We climb with each foot against a wall of the rock, and below our feet a crack of darkness where water drips. The rock under our hands is dry here, patterned with the light that comes from behind us, and then dark. Somewhere below us a stream runs through the rock, its sound magnified so that it seems to come from all around.

The climber sees the lights below him now, and works down through the gap of the rocks – awkwardly, with his wide shoulders – to where the brown rushlights spread their smoke up the rock wall, down onto the floor of red sand. And my people wait for us, in their clothes of gold and green.

Without being asked, the climber crouches to take off his metal spikes. He stands, and looks, and I see for a moment through his eyes the clear water running down the cave wall, the stone tables and the furniture of copper and silver, the young ones with their hair like reindeer moss and eyes like rowan tree berries as they reach to touch his plastic clothing.

"There is other climbing we can do. If you stay here with my people. If you like to climb."

His helmet is against the rock ceiling, and he takes that off as well. "Yes," he says. "Yes, I like to climb."

"You must leave your good iceaxe, the metal iceaxe of your grandfather, in a dry place below the rocks. But then you can stay with us and climb. For a short while."

"For a while?" He doesn't smile. But in the glow from the silver mirrors there's a light in his eyes that wasn't there before. "Like – seven years? Seven years is traditional, I believe. Is what the stories say."

The snows came hard that year, drifted deep over the bones of the fox on the corrie floor, while the man with the black helmet climbed over the ice gullies and the rocks deep frosted by the sea-damp air. But at last there came a day when the water of the Black Loch was blue like the eggs of the small bird they call wheatear. The red-speckled trout rose to dimple the surface in silver rings, then a line of pale foam showed where the water horse was moving again through the shallows. And above the lines of boulders left by the glacier, the cry of the curlews looped and curved through the sky, rising and then falling like the years and the seasons and the slow thoughts that pass through the mind of the mountain.¹

1. The story’s setting, and the photos, are Loch Toll nam Beist, the Loch of the Beast Hole, at the back of Beinn Alligin, Torridon.