Everything had been fine until I’d answered that question but now a silence hung in the air like a malevolent fart. I sucked on my whiskey and stared really hard into the bothy fire, perhaps I’d see a genie in the flames who would whisk me away from the coming confrontation. Tearing my eyes from the flickering flames I peered through the gloom and steaming socks at the other three men in the room. Rick, the one who was doing most of the talking, was still struggling to find a response to my answer to his querie. Steve, a bearded wizened elf of a man, was twisting his grey whiskers to a point with a vehemence that threatened to tear the hair from his face completely off. The last of the trio, David, who looked a bit like an English gent although he claimed Irish decent, giggled nervously. I could tell he was trying to figure out, if it came to it, and he lunged for his ice axe hanging over the fire, whether I would get there first.
Rick emitted an odd gurgle and then managed to twist it into the beginning of a sentence, “Yes…but…” David let out a short titter, or perhaps it was a sob. If we’d been in a western saloon, instead of a rain soaked bothy on the west coast of Scotland, it would have been at this point that that the piano would have fallen silent, everyone would have stopped playing cards and the barman would have reached for a hidden shot gun. “Yes but…” Rick intoned again, more confident this time. He was a big man who looked as though he had once been strong but had turned to fat. I was a little more relaxed, you see I’m not as quick as I used to be but I had worked out the answer to the problem that had been troubling David for the last few moments, I was closer to the ice axe than he was.
I’d known this point would come, sooner or later it always does. The moment I’d pushed open the bothy door and realised that I had company I’d known we’d get here sooner or later. At first the atmosphere had been welcoming, almost jovial, it always is. They’d offered me tea and we’d talked about the weather. They always talk about the weather. In glens up and down the highlands, in campsites, howfs and bothies, they talk about the weather. Or at least they do at first until they ask me that question and I reveal that I am the child of a different god. I tell them I despise everything they have spent years trudging about the hills trying to achieve. I prove to them undeniably that they have been chasing an illusion all these years and that nothing is as it seems. I ruin everything. Rick staggered to the end of his sentence like an old man who has climbed his last hill, “Yes but how many have you done?”
Sometimes I think it would be so much easier to lie, to pick a number out of the air and cling to it as my life raft in a sea of despair. Then they’d smile and nod knowingly, happily content that I was one of them, a fellow traveller in their man made topographical quest. “I’ve only 27 left to do,” I could say and everyone would grin confident I was one of the brethren and we could relax and talk about boots and rucksacks and how bad the midges were. I could do that, but I don’t, I swallow my whisky and utter the heresy, “Actually, I’m not a Munroist.”
Read more here
http://johndburns.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/the-unforgiven-mountaineer/
