Bump in the night MAGAZINE
Summer isn’t all sweetness and light as Stephen Gregory reveals with this dark tale…
It was a balmy evening in midsummer, but when the man in the
snow… until, after an hour or more, it had disappeared into a
corner of the bar started talking, he cast a shivery chill across
bank of dark grey cloud.
the room. The man was serious and calm. He wasn’t trying to top It had been a long warm day in the mountains of Snowdonia.
anyone’s stories. He finished his drink and stood up and left.
The bar was full of walkers and climbers. Their voices were
There was a shivery silence, until the youngsters filled it with
loud and boisterous, and their faces were flushed with too
their beery banter.
much sun and the beer they were hilariously quaffing. They
I went home. It was twilight, a soft and gentle evening in
were brimming with youth and their stories of conquest – the
midsummer. My home was an old caravan on a hillside, near the
crags they’d clambered, the summits they’d bagged.
village of Betws Garmon, a few miles down the valley from Rhydddu and Llyn Cwellyn. I was renting the caravan for the summer,
One of them, an especially ruddy and raucous youth, was
for only a few pounds a week – no water, no electricity, just a bed
teasing a gathering of girls about his sighting of a huge, hairy
and a table and a gas stove. The farmer had tried to make it more
hominid – a yeti or a sasquatch or the legendary bigfoot, yes,
comfortable for me, and he’d come along one day with a little
here in Snowdonia! And he was rewarded for his blarney with
black and white television and rigged it to a car battery.
a chorus of giggles and guffaws. I trudged up the track to the caravan, high above the road. Until the elderly man in the corner started to talk. He was
Before I went inside, I scrambled a few more yards to the cave…
lanky and lean, with a cap of silvery hair, a beaky face and big
a quarry-hole, a cleft in the rocks which had become almost
leathery hands. Quietly unassuming – for he was a veteran
completely overgrown with ash and rowan and lush green
climber who’d made his reputation in the Alps and the Andes
bracken. I liked to go there as the evening light was fading,
and the Himalayas – he said that he’d encountered the yeti, in
to watch the bats which flittered out of the cave, to see the
one of the highest, remotest valleys in Tibet. It had stalked him,
nightjar swooping silently across the fields, to enjoy the last of
he’d seen its looming man-like shape and its footsteps in the
the sunset across the valley below.
Page 30 NWM 2021
