Witness account · 3 min read · Set in The Northern Banks ·
The Smoke Signal on Northern Banks
A shepherd on the high pastures above Northern Banks sees a column of smoke rise from a ruined sheepfold every evening at dusk, and in the morning he finds the fire laid with stones in the shape of a message he can read but cannot repeat aloud.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: George Ashworth, shepherd
I've walked the top pastures above Northern Banks since I was a lad, and I know the fell in the dark. The old drystone folds, the bog holes, the path that runs along the crag edge where the wind comes up like a hand under your coat. I know which ewes will stray and which ones will stand their ground. I know the ruined fold at the top of Scarr Gill, the one nobody has used since the war, with its walls half down and a rowan tree growing out of the middle where the hearth used to be.
In late October, I started seeing smoke from it.
It was a thin grey thread, rising from the rowan's roots, every evening just as the light went. It was not a fire I had lit. It was not a fire anybody I knew had lit. It rose straight up in the still air for about a minute, then bent over toward the north-east, toward the village, and then it was gone, and the fell was quiet again.
I went up on the third evening to see. The fold was empty. The hearth stones were cold. There was no ash, no burnt wood, no sign of any fire at all. But the stones had been arranged, very carefully, in the shape of a letter. A capital A, I thought at first. Then I saw that it was an arrow, pointing down the slope toward the village, and beside it, in smaller stones, a line of marks I could not make out in the dusk.
I went down the fell in the dark, and I did not sleep that night.
The next evening the smoke rose again. I watched from the gate of the lower pen, with my lantern unlit and my dog at my heel. The smoke went up and bent over, and the fire at the rowan's roots flickered for a moment, very small and bright, and in its light I saw a figure standing in the ruined fold. A woman, tall and thin, in an old grey shawl, her hair down her back. She did not look at me. She was looking at the smoke as it rose, the way a woman looks at a letter she has written and is waiting to be answered.
When the smoke was gone, she turned and walked out of the fold and down the path toward the crag, and the dog whined, and I did not follow her.
In the morning I went up again. The hearth stones had been rearranged. The arrow was gone. The stones now made a short sequence, and I stood over them for a long time, trying to read it. It was not writing, not in any language I knew. But it was clear, as clear as a sentence spoken aloud. It said that someone was waiting at the bottom of the crag, and that they had been waiting since the war, and that they would wait until somebody came to say the name.
I did not say the name. I could not. I knew it. It was the name of my own mother, who had walked off the crag in the winter of 1947, and who had never been found, and who I had never told anyone I remembered.
I went down the fell and I have not been up to the fold since. But the smoke still rises from the rowan every evening, a thin grey thread, bending toward the village. And in the mornings, when I go down to the lower pen to see the ewes, I find the path beside the gate swept clean, the dust brushed into neat lines, and a small pile of white stones set at the gate post, in the shape of a letter, waiting for me to answer.