Shelter at Craig Dhu

Original story written for Revision Library.

Priya Chandra had been counting down the days to half term for weeks, not for the usual reasons but because her cousin Deepak Verma had finally talked their families into letting her join his hillwalking club's overnight trip into the Cairngorms. She had trained for this: three practice walks around the local reservoir, a new pair of boots worn in until they no longer pinched, and a rucksack packed and repacked until every strap sat exactly where it should. Still, as the minibus rattled along the single-track road towards the car park at Glen Aivie, her stomach fizzed with something that was not quite excitement and not quite fear.

The plan, Mr Whitlock had explained the night before, was straightforward enough. Twelve of them, four adults and eight members of the Year 6 to Year 8 club, would follow the well-marked path along the river, climb steadily through the pass, and reach Craig Dhu bothy - a stone shelter maintained by volunteers for walkers - well before dark. Supper would be cooked on camping stoves, sleeping bags rolled out on the wooden sleeping platform, and the whole group would be back at the minibus by lunchtime the next day. The forecast had promised a clear, cold morning with only a slim chance of afternoon showers.

For the first two hours, the walk matched the forecast exactly. The path wound along a burn that chattered over grey stones, and heather-covered slopes rose on either side, dusted here and there with the season's first frost. Priya found a rhythm in the steady crunch of boots on gravel, and Ffion Pritchard, walking beside her, pointed out a pair of red deer picking their way along a distant ridge. It was only as they began the climb into the pass that Priya noticed the sky behind them had turned the colour of an old bruise.

'Weather's changing its mind,' Mr Whitlock said, glancing back rather more often than he had before. He quickened the pace, and the easy chatter of the group thinned into the harder breathing of a proper climb. By the time they crested the pass, the wind had sharpened into something with edges, and the first flakes of snow were spinning sideways rather than falling. Within twenty minutes, the world had shrunk to a few metres of swirling white in every direction.

The blizzard did not build gradually; it simply arrived, as though a switch had been thrown. Snow hurled itself at them in fistfuls, stinging any bare skin it found, and the wind snatched the words from Mr Whitlock's mouth before the group at the back could hear them. Priya kept her eyes fixed on Deepak's rucksack, a dull orange smudge in the whiteout, terrified of losing sight of it even for a second. Ffion stumbled once on a hidden rock and Marcus Reid grabbed her arm before she could go down, both of them roped together now by nothing more than instinct and a shared refusal to panic.

Mr Whitlock stopped the group in the lee of a boulder, pulled out a map sealed in plastic, and checked it against his compass with hands that had gone clumsy with cold. 'Craig Dhu is four hundred metres that way,' he shouted over the din, pointing into what looked, to Priya, like solid white nothing. 'We stay together. Nobody stops. Nobody wanders.' It was the first time all day his voice had sounded anything other than cheerful, and that, more than the storm itself, was what finally frightened her.

They found the bothy more by luck than navigation, stumbling almost into its stone wall before anyone saw it. The door, weathered grey and swollen with damp, stuck fast until Deepak and Marcus threw their combined weight against it, and then the whole group tumbled gratefully into the dim, cold room beyond, hauling the door shut against the shrieking wind behind them.

Inside, Craig Dhu was little more than a single stone chamber with a rough hearth, a wooden sleeping platform along one wall, and a small table bearing a battered tin box. While the adults set about lighting the camping stoves and unpacking dry clothes, Priya knelt by the table and lifted the box's lid. Inside was a thick, water-stained visitors' book, its pages filled with decades of cramped handwriting: dates, names, weather reports, small jokes, and messages of thanks left by walkers who had sheltered here before her.

She read them by torchlight while her boots dried by the stove, and one entry, dated almost thirty years earlier, made her sit up straight. A hillwalker named Isla Fraser had written of being caught in a storm 'every bit as fierce as the ones the old shepherds warn you about', of surviving a night at Craig Dhu with two frightened younger cousins in her care, and of walking them safely down the next morning once the weather had cleared. 'The mountain doesn't care how scared you are,' Isla had written, 'it only cares whether you keep your head.' Priya read the line twice, then a third time, and found that her hands had finally stopped shaking.

Deepak, ladling out mugs of soup, noticed her expression and came to read over her shoulder. 'Sounds like good advice,' he said simply, and passed her a mug before she could answer. Outside, the wind battered the little building in long, shuddering gusts, but inside, for the first time since the pass, the room felt almost warm.

Supper that night was tinned soup and flatbread eaten by torchlight, and afterwards Mr Whitlock ran through the plan for the morning in a voice that had recovered its usual calm. If the snow eased, as the forecast suggested it might, they would retrace their steps to the minibus; if not, they would sit tight and wait, since a warm, dry bothy was infinitely safer than an exposed mountainside. Nobody argued. Twelve sleeping bags were laid out on the platform in a row, and Priya fell asleep faster than she had expected to, lulled by the low murmur of the wind and the occasional creak of the old stone building settling around them.

She woke to an unfamiliar sound: silence. The wind had dropped entirely overnight, and thin grey light was seeping under the door. When Mr Whitlock eased it open, the glen beyond had been transformed: every rock and heather clump smoothed under a thick, unbroken blanket of snow, glittering faintly under a sky that had finally cleared to a pale, washed-out blue.

The walk out took twice as long as the walk in had been planned to, since the group had to break a fresh trail through knee-deep drifts in places, but nobody complained. Priya found she was no longer watching Deepak's rucksack out of fear but simply enjoying, for the first time since the blizzard hit, the astonishing quiet of the mountains after snow. By the time the minibus came into view, small and yellow against the white expanse of the car park, her legs ached in a way that felt entirely earned.

That evening, back home, Priya took out her own notebook, the one she had been given for the trip and had barely touched, and wrote a single entry by the light of her bedside lamp. She did not describe the blizzard in detail, nor the fear she had felt crouched behind the boulder. Instead, she copied out Isla Fraser's words exactly as she remembered them, and beneath them added a line of her own: she had kept her head, and next time, she thought, she would be a little less afraid of having to.