Sunday 22nd October was the blackest night Jake had seen for a long time. Low clouds obscured the light of the moon so that he could barely see his hand in front of his face. He drank the last of his brew and could feel the hot liquid make its way down his throat to his stomach, a comforting contrast to the chill night air. It lifted his spirits no end – it always did. Slowly and deliberately, he packed everything away and set out, without bothering to glance at his map. There was no need. First light was another three hours away and he had long since covered his target of twenty-five kilometres. Could he possibly make it forty-five?… Push! Push! Push! Within half an hour the sweat mingled with the thin sheen of raindrops on his forehead. He was making good speed; just like old times, except now he lacked a target at the end of the tab. Tonight was for him alone.
It was cold - the kind of damp, icy cold that made his fingers swell to twice their normal size, and forced him to arch his back, shrinking into his body so that less of it was exposed to the elements. Although it was raining hard, his secret was always the same. Take in plenty of fluids and keep the body core hot. A small drop in the core temperature by even a couple of degrees could prove fatal, especially for the lone nightwalker. A long ten-hour tab through the night was nothing to Jake – covering long distances was his food and drink. Nothing made him feel as good as finishing a long drag just before first light and getting into cover before anyone else was up and about. There was a saying which always brought a fleeting smile to his lips,
‘An old soldier never dies; he just fades into the undergrowth.’ At thirty-six, Jake was certainly not an old soldier. He had, however, been out of the army for two years now and quite liked the position of postman in the little village of Fenton in the lowland hills of Scotland. The lifestyle was as far away from his past as he could possibly get, and from his window he could look out over the rolling countryside. The Ochil hills were a gateway, leading up to some of the best scenery he had ever come across in all his travels. And after eighteen years in the military, serving throughout the world and in many conflicts, that was saying something.
The night was coming to a close and the sky in the far distance was paling into greyness. Jake felt good, and knew he could keep going for a long time yet. He was wet through but his mind was still alert and he was in good shape. He had pushed himself hard and had covered a great deal of ground tonight but time was almost up and with first light fast approaching, his old military instincts began to clamour that he should find a safe-haven. He tried to push the thought aside – those impulses were from a time when there could have been people out looking for him, people wanting to do him some damage. But now there was only Jake, the hills and a few thousand sheep to worry about. He was now only twenty-five metres from the summit, tired and wet but glad to be nearly home. It was still dark and the ground made a squelching sound as he pushed towards the top. There wasn’t a breath of wind, leaving the dampness to hang in the air. The small cairn at the top of King’s Point suddenly loomed out of the darkness - it was like meeting an old friend, and Jake’s spirits lifted. A couple of hundred metres down to his left was the flat plateau known to everyone as the Mol. Although he couldn’t see it in the darkness he knew it was there and he could feel it. It wasn’t really a plateau - in fact, it wasn’t even particularly flat - but from far below in the village it looked as though someone long ago had taken a huge slice out of the side of the hill and appeared to be as level as a billiard table. Jake knew he would be home soon so he ignored the tiredness and damp that was beginning to seep into his skin, and pushed on through the dark. The hill suddenly fell away and the updraught from the valley far below made him wince. It was quite windy on this side of the mount and he could almost feel the void of the blackness below. Jake pushed on and on, ever closer to home and further from the wilderness that he loved. The village was only two kilometres away. He took a break and sat with his back against a large rock. He made a brew and watched in silence as daylight slowly began to break over the far-away hills. Night was turning into day and he could smell the freshness that he loved. The little village below was still asleep and nothing moved, except the small stream behind the row of houses on the outskirts. At the far left-hand side of the settlement, the trees slowly swayed in the light morning breeze and the field behind the trees held his old friend, Harry B. Fletcher’s sheep. Harry was an interesting man – a ‘poacher turned farmer’. Every now and then, the sheep would take it upon themselves to somehow get into the village of their own accord, much to Harry’s great consternation and the amusement of the local children. As Jake sat there on the flat rocky outcrop, overlooking the small town below, his thoughts drifted back to life in the village when he was a boy and the stories the other children told. One such tale was about King’s Point Mol itself. According to the other kids, it was the way to a secret hidden valley, which in years gone by had held a thousand wild horses. Time and again, all the children would try and reach the top only to be forced back by the sheer scale of the climb. In reality, they never managed to get more than a hundred metres up on the lower slopes, but at the age of nine the climb had felt to Jake like an attempt on Everest itself. Even at that tender age though, he had known that one day he would look down on the secret valley and would go on to achieve even greater feats of climbing and endurance. He loved the feeling of the wind and rain in his face, of standing so high up that he could see the rest of the world far below. It always gave him a sense of how unimportant he was in the great scheme of things, how insignificant and small he really was. These hills had been standing here for a million years and more and he would be here and gone in the blink of an eye. To Jake it had always been, and would continue to be, a privilege and a pleasure to stretch his legs across these peaks. The sky above had relented and released all the rain it had held. Small pockets of light blue could be seen trying to push through the tumbling clouds, declaring that it was going to be a good day. Jake sat and watched for half an hour as the night lost its battle with the coming daylight. The inevitability of it all was not lost on him. If only life itself was as predictable as the sight he was witnessing.