The Rescue

The call came at half past four on a Sunday afternoon in November, just as Rhiannon was putting the kettle on. A walker from Birmingham had not come down from Snowdon. His wife had phoned the police from the car park at Pen-y-Pass, where she had been waiting for three hours. He had left that morning in good weather, but by lunchtime the cloud had come down over the mountain, and now the rain was falling sideways.

Rhiannon had been a volunteer with the mountain rescue team for eleven years, and for the last six of them she had worked with Bryn, a black and white border collie with one brown eye and one blue. Even though Bryn was officially a search dog, most people in the village thought of him as a slightly mad family pet. He chased seagulls, stole socks and was frightened of the vacuum cleaner. On the mountain, however, he became a completely different animal.

By the time they reached the meeting point, it was almost dark. The team leader, a quiet farmer called Huw, spread a map across the bonnet of the Land Rover. The missing man, Neil, was sixty-two and fairly experienced, although he had never climbed Snowdon before. His wife thought he had taken the Pyg Track. "In spite of the conditions, we have to go now," Huw said. "If he's injured, he won't survive a night out there."

Rhiannon checked her radio, her head torch and the small light on Bryn's harness, so that the others could see him in the dark. Then she took out the woolly hat that Neil's wife had given her and held it under Bryn's nose. He sniffed it carefully, looked up at her and waited. "Find him," she said quietly, and he was gone.

For the first hour, the search went well. Bryn worked backwards and forwards across the path, his nose close to the wet rocks, and every few minutes he came back to check that Rhiannon was still following. Despite the wind, he seemed confident. Then, about halfway up, the fog became so thick that Rhiannon could hardly see her own boots. She clipped a long line to Bryn's harness so as not to lose him, and they moved forward more slowly, step by step.

At a point where the path turned sharply to the left, Bryn stopped. He lifted his head, turned right, away from the path, and pulled hard on the line. Rhiannon hesitated. To the right, the ground fell steeply towards a lake, and in this weather it was dangerous. Every instinct told her to stay on the path. On the other hand, in six years Bryn had never once been wrong when he behaved like this.

She radioed Huw to give him her position, and then she followed the dog. They went down slowly, sliding on wet grass and loose stones. Twice she called Neil's name, and twice the wind threw it back at her. Then, on the third time, she heard something: a thin voice, somewhere below them, shouting for help.

Neil was lying at the bottom of a small rocky slope, about fifty meters from the path. He had walked off the track in the fog, slipped and twisted his ankle so badly that he could not stand. Although he was soaking wet and shaking with cold, he managed a weak smile when Bryn arrived and began to lick his face. "I've never been so pleased to see a dog in my life," he said.

Rhiannon wrapped him in a survival bag and gave him hot sweet tea from her flask in order to warm him up while they waited. Within forty minutes, Huw and three other volunteers had arrived with a stretcher. Carrying Neil down the mountain in the dark took almost four hours, and by the time they reached the ambulance, it was nearly midnight.

A week later, a parcel arrived at Rhiannon's house. Inside there was a card from Neil and his wife, a check for the rescue team and, for Bryn, an enormous bone. Rhiannon read the card twice. Then she went to find the dog, who was asleep on the sofa, guarding one of her socks.