The Walk

Marek had promised his aunt an easy day. On the map the route ran along the ridge as a thin green line, and the guidebook said four hours. He was twenty-six and walked fast. Delia was sixty-one and walked slowly, but she had walked these hills since before he was born.

They set off at nine from the car park below the reservoir. The water lay flat and grey, and a single boat had been tied up at the far end since the summer. "We'll be down by four," Marek said. Delia looked at the far shoulder of the mountain and said nothing at all.

The first hour was good. The path climbed beside a stream, then turned up a long slope of short grass. Delia stopped twice to breathe. Both times she pointed at something Marek hadn't seen: a hare, and then a line of old stones that had once been a wall.

By half past eleven they were on the ridge. The wind had turned, and the air smelled wet. Marek noticed that the tops of the hills to the west had disappeared. "That's just cloud," he said. "It'll pass." Delia pulled her hood up and said, "It's coming towards us, not past us."

Twenty minutes later the mist reached them. It came quickly, the way water fills a bowl. The world shrank. The path, which had been perfectly clear, split into three thin tracks made by sheep, and none of them looked more real than the others.

Marek took out his phone. There was no signal. He took out the map instead and held it against his chest so the wind couldn't take it. "There's a shortcut here," he said, moving his thumb. "Straight down this gully into the valley. It saves us an hour."

"No," Delia said. It was the first hard word she had used all day. "I went down that gully in 1989 with two men who were stronger than you. It took us five hours and one of them lost a boot. In mist you can't see where it steepens."

They argued for a while, standing still in the wet air, both of them getting cold. Marek said the map was clear. Delia said the map had been drawn by someone sitting in a warm office. Then she took a small compass out of her pocket and put it in his hand.

"Follow the wall," she said. "It was built two hundred years ago and it hasn't moved since. It goes down the long way, but it goes down." Marek looked at the compass, then at the grey nothing where the gully was supposed to be, and did as he was told.

The wall took them along the edge of the plateau for an hour and a half. Twice they lost it and found it again. At three o'clock they came to a stone shelter with half a roof, and they ate their sandwiches inside it while the mist moved past the doorway like smoke.

"I'm sorry," Marek said. Delia shook her head. "Don't be sorry. Be slower." She said it kindly, and then she said that if they had gone down the gully, they would still be somewhere above the trees, in the dark, with one torch between them.

They reached the road at twenty past six. The last bus had gone at six. They walked another kilometre to a gate, where a farmer was loading feed onto a trailer, and he looked at their boots and their wet shoulders and asked where they had come over.

"Along the wall," Delia said. The farmer nodded once, as if that were the only sensible answer, and drove them the eleven miles back to the reservoir. In the car Marek was quiet. He had learned something that couldn't be printed on a map, and he was too stubborn to say so out loud.