Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Duncombe ·
Tracks in the Snow at Duncombe
A dairy farmer above Duncombe finds the footprints of a girl leading into a closed field in the middle of a February blizzard, and the tracks come out again on the far side, in the same line, though no one ever walked through.
- reliability: corroborated
- witness: Gordon Alt, dairy farmer
I have farmed the Duncombe hill for thirty-eight years, and I know the snow. It comes in off the moor in February and takes the whole valley in a night. You wake up and the gate is buried and the lane is gone and the sky has the flat white look that means the wind will drop by noon and leave the drifts standing like walls. I have dug out sheep and cattle, a tractor, twice a postman, and once a man from the council who had gone out to read a meter.
On the eleventh of February we had the worst fall in a decade. I was up at five to check the herd in the shed, and when the light came I walked out to the top field to look at the fence, because the drifts there had buried the wire in the spring.
The field was white and unbroken. Snow lay on every fold of the ground to the depth of a man's knee. Then I saw the tracks.
They started at the gate in the lower hedge, a line of small boot prints, a girl's by the size and the stride, going straight up the centre of the field toward the old stone barn. Each print was sharp and clean, the snow pressed down to the bottom, the heel and toe distinct. There was no other track in the field. Not a fox, not a bird, not my own boots, which I had left on the road. Only that single line of prints, going up in the falling snow, perfectly even, perfectly deliberate.
I followed them. The field was closed, it was the one I had shut off for the lambing pens in the autumn, and nobody had any business walking in it. The prints went up past the barn. They did not go round it. They went through the wall at the back, through the gap where the stones had fallen in the storm of 1987, and into the blank white nothing on the other side.
I stood at the gap for a long time, looking through. The snow was falling thickly on the far side, and I could not see more than a few yards. But I could see the tracks, still going on, a line of neat prints in the drifts, and I could hear, very faint, the sound of a girl humming a tune I did not know.
I did not go through. I went back to the lower gate, and I looked for the tracks coming out, and I could not find them. I searched the whole lower field, and the lane, and the hedge. There was nothing. The line had simply stopped at the gap in the wall.
I told the police at Ostmark. They sent two officers out on the Monday, and they walked the field with me, and they found the tracks where I said they were, going up to the barn and through the gap. They were not frightened. They said it was a known thing, that the snow sometimes did strange things on the Duncombe side of the hill. They said nobody had been reported missing in the district.
Then the younger officer went round to the far side of the barn, where the gap came out onto the open moor, and he came back with a face like paper. He said there were tracks on that side too. A single line of small boot prints, going down the hill toward the village, in the same even stride. And they had been made, he said, by somebody walking the other way, back to front, heel first, so that the prints pointed at the barn.
The tracks on the moor side were fresh. They had not been there when we came up. And at the gap itself, where the wall had fallen, somebody had left a small object in the snow, a child's hair ribbon, blue, tied in a neat bow.
The officers took it away in a bag. They did not say whose it was. The snow melted in the spring and the field was let to the Ashby grazing, and the gap in the wall has never been mended. I do not walk up there any more. But every February, when the first big fall comes down off the moor, I wake before dawn and go out to the top gate and look, and there is always one line of tracks, going up the hill in the new snow, heading for the barn, and at the top of the field, very faint, I can hear a girl humming, and then the wind takes the sound, and the tracks go on through the gap into the white.