What seems hours later, there is a window in the weather and the rescue helicopter arrives and poor Ralph’s body is whisked away. We try to console Maggie as we wind our way down to Shap. Nobody eats or sleeps that night and our petty grievances are lost in grief for our poor companion. What a dreadful accident.
At breakfast the next day, Maggie declares that we must go on, that Ralph would want us to continue and to fulfil his dream of completing the Coast to Coast. Afterwards she will return and collect his body, take him back to the USA and have his ashes scattered over the Grand Canyon. We agree to push on; it is a joyless day of hiking despite the glorious sunshine and the pleasures of slogging through boggy pasture after boggy pasture and stepping carefully between great piles of cow and sheep manure. Stile after stile do we clamber over.
The group is losing its identity: Bruce and David are no longer speaking; Denise the gazelle walks solitary far ahead of the herd; Jean has let slip that once she was in army intelligence and now refuses to say more; Mel complains that at breakfast they gave her activated almond milk instead of soya; Rod appears out of nowhere, walks with us for a time and disappears again with a bizarre story that he and Wally are going to see a Shakespeare play and Jeri tries to explain differential calculus to the stragglers.
At dinner that night Maggie wonders how Ralph could have fallen. She knows it must have been an accident and yet it seems so improbable: Ralph was an adventurer, a mountaineer and trekker who had even lived in the wilds of outback Australia. She knows it was a horrible accident in dreadful weather and yes, he was a risk taker bounding from boulder to boulder and yet – so she will go to the police tomorrow in Kirkby Stephen and get them to double check re the possibility of foul play. ‘It is silly, I know, but I will rest easier’.
The next day there is no Maggie or Jenny at breakfast. Jenny has complained of a sore foot and disappeared for the weekend to find a doctor; a tad strange, but we shrug and accept. Maggie, the poor thing, must be overwhelmed with grief. It comes time to leave and still no sign so Will knocks on her door; no answer, they force the door open and – oh no! – there lies sweet Maggie stone cold dead! She has died in bed of a broken heart. Romantic, of course, very Juliet or Lady of Shalott and we stand dumbstruck that this can happen still in our post modern world.
What on earth is happening in our little world?
To be continued …