* * *
‘This is Mountain Rescue,’ a radio crackled. Murray turned all around him, frantic, catching sight of a tiny red light blinking just out of arm’s reach of where Finlay lay. He grabbed for it, barely able to make out the buttons as the last light faded on the mountainside.
‘I’m with Finlay now!’ Murray shouted into the receiver, not even knowing how to operate the thing, having to heave air into his fog-soaked lungs. Why couldn’t they hear him down there? What was he doing wrong?
He pressed every button and twirled every knob. ‘We need help!’ he yelled.
Nell had already decided the best course of action was to throw herself down bodily upon the comfy bed that was the unmoving Finlay.
Something caught Murray’s eye as the bands of fog thinned further. A backpack, lying only a little way off. He’d retrieved it in seconds, struggling with frozen fingers to undo the zippers, and inside, seen through tears of absolute relief, he found something hedidknow how to work.
* * *
Down in the town, where everyone had long held a collective breath, standing sentry at their windows or in their gardens or in the street, wrapped in layers, radios to their ears, keeping their eyes fixed on the white mist that hid the mountain behind the magician’s cloak they hoped at any moment would be whipped away, every last person saw the firework emerge from the gloom, casting a diffuse red light over the western slope: a bright red flare signalling that at least someone was alive up there.
36
It was probably for the best that Finlay didn’t know a thing about what had happened next: the whole team arriving with helmet torches flashing, the stretcher rescue – since the helicopter still couldn’t fly – and the jolting march back to the cruive where Doctors Hargreave and Millen stripped and warmed him, re-setting his shoulder under the single bare light bulb, the sedation making no difference to him, he was so lost in the In Between.
There’d been a mask over his face and gas and air, a bleeping monitor on his finger, a drip in his arm, a cold stethoscope pressed repeatedly to his chest in front of his fire which had never been so stoked with logs as it was that night.
It had gone eight in the morning when he’d finally opened his eyes, and although he was dimly aware of a vast assembly of figures crowded in his little cottage, the first sight that greeted him was the face of Murray McIntyre leaning over him in amazement, and by his side loomed the long, pink, disgusting tongue of a big, black, ridiculous dog with a smiling, drooling mouth.
‘He’s awake!’ Murray said, visibly drooping with relief.
With a sense of floating lightness that Finlay had never experienced in all the years before he nearly died on his mountain, he let his eyes close and he drifted off into peaceful sleep once more while Murray tightly held his hand over the covers.
* * *
‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after him, and as you said yourself, it’s just for a few days, until he’s fully on his feet,’ Murray was saying at the cruive door as Dr Hargreave took her leave.
‘You can call me at the surgery or on my mobile, any time,’ she said, before taking one last look at her patient, reclined under blankets on the sofa in front of the crackling hearth.
‘I’ve got this,’ Murray reassured her, and Finlay wondered how the decision had been made that it was to be Murray, of all people, who hung around to nurse him.
There was a lot of stuff his memory was hazy on. Finlay’s rational brain knew that there had passed one whole week since he’d awakened – Murray had confirmed it – a week of his lying prone by his fireside, submitting to being monitored and jabbed, weighed and washed, alongside all the fuss of people bringing up supplies and dropping in to ‘check on the patient’, but it had all merged together into a strange, drowsy blur.
Now all of that was over and he was to be left alone again. He’d continue to allow Murray to stay, if he really must. That dog, though? That was another matter.
Nell snored on the hearthrug as Alice stepped out into the bright early-February noon light.
‘Stick to the community path!’ Finlay shouted after her from his sick-sofa, and she waved away his concern as the door closed. She’d made the trek up and down from the surgery so many times in the last week, she knew the route all too well.
Murray stood on the doormat, his fists bunched at his hips. He was giving Finlay a funny look.
‘What?’ Finlay wanted to know.
‘Nothing. It’s just strange, everyone leaving at last.’
‘Hmph,’ Finlay grunted. ‘Thought they’d never leave me in peace.’
‘Theysaved your life.’
The fire crackled in the silence as Murray let that sink in for him, but Finlay had heard enough about what happened to know it had, in fact, been Murray who’d saved his life. Though Murray had deflected that it was ‘all Nell’. According to him, it had taken hours to reunite man and dog on the mountainside, but once Nell was safely back on her lead, she’dbeen the one who had scented Finlay and dragged Murray the hundred yards to where he’d fallen. ‘Clever girl,’ Murray had repeatedly called the dog over the intervening days, while feeding her bits of the cold chicken and pork pies that the town folks had sent up.
It turned out Finlay had fallen only a couple of metres off a stony outcrop, but it had been enough to knock him out, dislocate his shoulder, crack some ribs, and send all his belongings flying.
‘Hungry?’ Murray said now, still standing awkwardly by the door.
