Wild Moment: Alastair Miller
"We can’t be more than five or six yards apart, sizing up each other’s intentions..." A strange encounter on the mighty Liathach.
It must have been ten or a dozen years ago. A big day with some airy sensations followed, on the way back down to the glen, by a strange encounter that has lodged in the mind...
We had made our way up into Coire na Caime, the Crooked Corrie, grand and, as usual, deserted. The lack of a path keeps it private. Nor is it a through route to anywhere, a huge amphitheatre with the turreted main ridge of Liathach straight ahead. There’s every manifestation of rock – boulder, outcrop, crag, huge screes swooping down to a cluster of pretty lochans connected by slow-moving streams. Mossy greens and yellows abound.
My guide, Paul (there’s going to be some modest climbing higher up), remarks that no-one has ever asked him to guide them up the north ridge before. So much the better, I reflect: if I prove to be his unfittest and most tiresome client ever, he will at least have had a novel assignment.
We head up into the crook of the corrie, past a few snow patches. At the foot of the pinnacles – big rock steps, really – we rope up for the tricky part of the expedition. Paul moves up effortlessly, I follow carefully, very out of practice. From here Beinn Eighe is a streamlined whale filling the view to the east.
Ignore! Concentrate!
We seem to be making a frontal assault rather than taking the flank routes I’ve read about. Plenty of holds, though. Paul tightens the rope to assist an awkward little push-up onto a broad ledge. Quite soon there remains only a walkable ramp to the main ridge. We turn left, bypass those turrets (enough is enough) and make straight for Spidean, Liathach’s central pyramid, picking our way up over a jumble of big quartzite blocks. Time for a contemplative pause and some food, with the weather now closing in a little. We move off and drop down into the big corrie to the southeast.
In the distance we can see two deer quite close to our line of descent, which is going to take us round the corrie. We draw closer. And closer. Surely they’ll be gone any minute – it doesn’t take much to spook a deer at a hundred yards. But for some reason these ones are loath to budge. We approach a little cautiously, slightly downhill of them, giving them room – four, up here, could be a crowd. The two young stags with velvet antler buds and dull coats, maybe after a tough winter, stand fast, watchfully. We can’t be more than five or six yards apart, sizing up each other’s intentions. It’s uncanny looking them in the eye like this. If they bolt, however, we’re in danger of being run over. We edge past.
Looking back, we can see they have instantly returned to whatever they were so reluctant to abandon. Irresistible lichens? Potent trace elements? As larders go, the corrie is on the frugal side.
Actually, though, we shouldn’t have encountered the stags at all. What I’d had in mind originally had been a less strenuous circuit starting and finishing at the other end of the mountain. I’d let myself get seriously carried away by Paul’s counterproposal, but Liathach had been kind – and mysterious.