By Hamish Brown

THE BOTHY BREW (Cont.)

Ben realised the seriousness of his situation at once. (There were several missing tips to his toes from an experience on an unplanned bivouac on Nanda Devi.) He could not even be sure, if he bad walked past the bothy, whether he would have done so past its front or along the back. In other words, the bothy could be in any direction.

He laid down the water carrier and blew into his chilled fingers, his mind racing to cope with the crisis. He could hardly see now (without specs, his eyesight was not very good at the best of times) for the gloom reduced everything to a blur of gyrating grey. He set off, trying to follow his track back to the burn in the hope of discovering his original bothy-to-bum prints. After half a dozen steps he knew he wasn't on any track. Contact had completely gone.

Ben was by then shivering violently. He abandoned the water carrier and crammed his numb bands into his duvet pockets then took them out again to lace his boots and zip up the gaiters. His fingers were so stiff he could hardly tie the cord round their tops. Shelter was the desperate priority, but shelter was unlikely. Others bad perished in like circumstances, he knew. You could burrow into old snow, maybe, but with new powder you could do nothing. There was not even a gully or boulder near the bothy that could give him shelter. Movement alone would help him, temporarily at least, till the insidious fingers of hypothermia would tease life itself from his failing grasp. Ben ran.

He ran blindly (in more senses than one), he ran, and jumped and spun, in a frenzy of activity and gradually a certain warmth eased back into his frozen limbs. His ears burned, his fingers ached with a return to feeling, his bladder throbbed so he had to relieve its tension. He rejoiced at the restored feeling -- but his gambler's gallop had not led him to chancing on the bothy. The cold immediately gripped his half-clad frame again. He set off on another wild run.

All too soon he had to pause, gasping for breath, the wretched snowflakes being sucked into his lungs, his face red with exertion yet at the same time his nose and ears tingling with frostnip rather than blood-warmth. Three more times he careered about in search of the bothy, in search of body-warmth. Each time he stopped sooner, froze quicker, while the spectre of reality shrieked in his brain as the wind screamed in the world about him. He was going to die. It was ridiculous. It was infuriating. It. was overwhelmingly sad.

He did not want to die.

Yet he was realist enough to recognise his mortal danger. When he ultimately became too exhausted to keep warm by physical exertion he was doomed. When the heart could no longer flush the surface of his body with warmth the cold would win. He would drift off into a last gentle sleep. It would not be painful, like lying broken below the Orion Face (as friend Tony had died) but the cold would burrow inwards to the core of his body and the heart-pump would fail. He'd lectured about exposure often enough. He knew. He knew.

Should he just give up, he wondered? Why prolong the process? He could hardly think straight any longer, but the lust for life drove him again and again into renewed but diminishing bursts of activity. He was a human robot, programmed for life, but with the parts worn out and failing. He felt tears wet his cheeks but when he put up a hand to wipe them away he could feel nothing. His hand might as well have been made of wood. The wet turned to stars of ice on his wet cheeks.

He decided some form of hallucination was part of this sleepy disintegration for he could hear spectral music through the storm. A jig of death. He thought of Saint-Saens. But then, like a dream recalled, he realised the tune was a march, one he recognised as The Macmillans of Arkaig, which Gordon had composed for the Oban Mod. Gordon? Good God! It was Gordon playing his pipes. In a last surge of energy he staggered towards the sound.

In a few steps he came up against a wall. He could not grasp its significance for a moment. It was simply a cruel barrier. He hammered at it with his wooden fists so cornflakes of snow sprayed off the grey granite. "Let me by! Let me by!," he sobbed. Then it dawned. It was the wall of the bothy. He groped his way along it in the direction of the wind-lilting sound.

Gordon stood in the doorway, red-faced, a figure of ridiculous unreality in his underwear, a foot tapping out the rhythm ("trying tae stop ma bloody toes freezin.") As Ben fell towards him there was a dying wail from the pipes. Gordon caught him and, as he was dragging Ben across to the bedshelf the casualty opened his eyes and tried to speak. Gordon bent to listen.

"Mind, I once said you could play yir pipes at ma funeral?"

Gordon nodded.

"Well, you near did, pal...."

That was thanks of a sort, Gordon supposed In the end it was he who had to make the bothy brew.

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