Aiming Off

by Enrico Fermi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The trig pillar on Ben Macdui wore a coat of rime a hand thick, all on the west side, grown out into the wind in feathers. Agnes Rennie broke a piece off with her glove to see how hard it was. Hard. It had been building since Thursday.

"Fourteen forty," she said.

Calum had his phone out. He was twenty-six and a junior doctor at Raigmore and he had driven them both down from Inverness at six that morning, and he held the phone the way his generation held them, low and flat, like a compass. The blue dot sat on the summit of Ben Macdui. Above it the battery said twenty-three per cent.

"We're here," he said.

"I know where we are. I am leaning on it."

The cloud had come up out of the Lairig Ghru while they ate. At twenty past two the Cairn Gorm had been a white whale to the north-east with the sun on its back. At half past, it had gone. Now the cloud was on the summit with them, and it was not dark cloud. It was white, lit from inside, the same white as the snow, so that the ground ran up into the air and the air came down onto the ground and there was no line where one became the other. Agnes held her hand out at arm's length and looked past it. Nothing behind the glove. Not grey, not far. Nothing.

She took the map case from the inside of her jacket. She had marked the legs on it the night before, at the kitchen table, in pencil, because pencil does not run. Summit to the lochan. Lochan to the col at the head of Coire Domhain. Col to the big cairn at Point 1141. Then down the Fiacaill ridge to the car park, where it would be dark. Beside each leg she had written two numbers: the bearing, and the distance.

"Phone," she said.

Calum looked at it. The screen had gone black. He pressed the button. The apple came up and went away again.

"It was twenty-three per cent."

"It was twenty-three per cent at body temperature," she said. "Now it is six below and the battery is a chemical. It goes slow when it is cold. Put it inside, next to your skin. It'll come back when you are warm, and by then you will not need it."

He put it inside his jacket. He did not say anything. She could see him deciding not to, which she liked in him. His father had never decided not to say anything in his life.

---

The first leg was easy, which was what she distrusted about it. There was a line of cairns from the summit down towards the lochan, and in summer there was a path, and even in this you could go from cairn to cairn, as long as you could see the next one before you lost the last. They went one at a time. Calum went ahead on the bearing until he was a dark shape about to vanish, and stopped, and she came up to him; then he went on again. It was slow. It was meant to be slow.

She counted as she walked. It was a thing she had done since she was a girl on the Mounth, before she knew it was a technique: every time the left foot came down, one. On flat ground in summer she took sixty-four of these to the hundred metres. She had measured it on the running track at Aberdeen in 1987, and again on the beach at Nairn last year, to see whether age had changed it. Sixty-five. Age had changed it by one. In soft snow, going downhill with a pack, the stride shortens. She called it seventy-two. She did not know it was seventy-two. She knew it was not sixty and not ninety, and that was all she needed to know it was.

Every hundred metres she moved a toggle on the cord of her map case. There were ten toggles; when the ten were down she pushed them all back up and tied a knot in the end of the cord.

Calum did not count. He walked as if the ground would be there, and it was.

At twenty-six minutes past three they stopped on something flat. The ground had been going down and then it was not going down, and the snow under their feet was level in a way that snow on a hill never is. Agnes knelt and dug with her mitten. Twenty centimetres down there was ice: grey, clear, with a bubble in it.

"Lochan Buidhe," she said. "Highest water in Britain."

"How did you know it was here? Before you dug?"

"The knot and the toggles said nineteen hundred metres. The map says two thousand. The ground went flat. And this is the only flat thing on the map." She stood. "Three reasons that do not depend on each other. One of them could be wrong. Three of them together, not likely."

He nodded and looked down at the hole, and at the bubble in the ice.

"Somewhere down there," he said. "To the right. That's where the Feith Buidhe goes."

"East. Into Loch Avon."

She did not say anything else about it, and he did not ask, because everybody who walked on the plateau knew. In November 1971 a party from a school in Edinburgh had been caught up here in a blizzard, near this water, and six of them had not come down. There had been a refuge then, by the burn; they took it away afterwards, because people walked towards it in bad weather instead of off the hill. Agnes's brother had been fifteen that winter, the same age as some of the children, and their mother would not let him go to the Cairngorms that winter, or the next. Calum was named for that brother. He knew about him what there was to know, which was not much: a bicycle, a dog called Fly, the Dee at Potarch in the summer of 1973. Iain did not talk about it. Agnes did not either. They had given his name to a boy and it was there, walking on a bearing in front of her, and that was enough talk.

She set the second bearing on the compass and turned the housing with her teeth in her glove.

"Eight hundred metres to the col," she said. "Uphill a bit. Then it narrows."

---

The col at the head of Coire Domhain is not a narrow place, if you are standing on it in July. There are perhaps two hundred metres of good flat ground between the top of the Domhain on the right hand, which falls away east to Loch Avon, and the cliffs of Coire an t-Sneachda off to the left. Two hundred metres is a field. You could play football on it.

In February the cornice on the Domhain side comes out over the corrie like the brim of a hat, three, five, eight metres. It is made of snow that the wind has packed, and from above it looks exactly like the plateau, because it is the plateau, until it is not. The brim does not care whether you are standing on rock or on air.

So the field was smaller. And they could not see across the field. They could see about four metres of it.

Agnes did not aim for the middle. You cannot hit the middle of anything with a compass in a whiteout; the needle is good to two or three degrees, your feet are good to five, and over eight hundred metres five degrees is seventy metres one way or the other. If you aim for the middle and miss, you do not know which side you missed on. So she had taken the bearing, on the kitchen table, a little to the left of the col — towards the Sneachda side, where the edge was further off and the ground rose before it fell. When they came to the rising ground they would know they were left, and turn right, and walk along it. In the books it is called aiming off. Her father had called it being wrong on purpose.

"We're going the wrong way," said Calum, after a while. He had his hand on the map case.

"We are going slightly the wrong way. On purpose. Keep walking."

The wind had got up. It came from the west, across their left shoulders, and it carried snow at the height of their knees in a long hiss, so that the ground seemed to be moving and they seemed to be standing still. Agnes had read that pilots flying into cloud lose the horizon and then lose up and down, and their bodies tell them they are level when they are in a turn. Walking was not so different. Twice she felt sure the slope ran down to the left, and twice she stopped and kicked a lump of hard snow loose and watched which way it rolled, and the slope ran down to the right. She did not trust her feet. She trusted the snow.

The toggles said four hundred, and then five.

"How many do you get?" she said. "Steps."

"I'm not counting."

"Count from here. Every left foot."

He counted. She counted. At the next stop she said, "Ninety-one."

"Seventy-eight."

He was taller; that was right. But not so much taller. She worked it in her head with the wind in her teeth. On her own count they had come a hundred and twenty-six metres since she had asked him. For his count to say the same, his number to the hundred would have to be sixty-two, which on soft snow, uphill, with his legs, was about right. It was within ten per cent, which on this hill was the size of her own error anyway. Two counts that did not depend on each other. They agreed as well as two counts could.

And the watch. Twenty-two minutes since the lochan. Uphill, in this: three kilometres in the hour at best, so fifty metres in a minute. Eleven hundred metres? No. They had not been walking for all of the twenty-two minutes. They had stopped, she had kicked the snow twice, they had stood and counted. Fifteen minutes of walking, at best. Seven hundred and fifty. Maybe less. Probably less.

So: the toggles said six hundred and ten. The watch said not more than seven hundred and fifty. The ground had not yet risen on the left.

"We should be there," Calum said. "You said eight hundred. We've been walking for ages."

"We have been walking for twenty-two minutes and standing still for seven of them. We have come six hundred metres, and the error on that is fifty, maybe sixty. Not two hundred."

"And if your seventy-two is wrong?"

"Then it is sixty-eight, or seventy-six. It is not forty. It is not a hundred and forty." She put the map case back inside her jacket. "If I am wrong, I am wrong by a little, and I know where. You can walk on that."

He looked at her. His face was white along the cheekbones where the wind had been at it.

"It's ten to four," he said. "It gets dark at half five."

"It does."

"So we should go faster."

She thought about that. It was not a stupid thing to say. If you have so many metres to go and so many minutes to do them in, you divide one by the other and you go at that speed or more. Every number in it was right.

"No," she said. "Slower."

---

She went in front now. She did not want him in front, because she could not tell him what to feel for, and she did not have time to work out how.

Every twenty paces she stopped. She took a clementine from the side pocket of her pack — she had brought six, as she always did, because they are heavy for what they give you but they are the only thing you can eat with mittens on — and she threw it, underarm, a little to the right of the bearing, about five or six metres. Orange shows in a whiteout. It is about the only thing that does. The clementine went out into the white, small and very bright, and came down, and sat on the snow. Something to look at. Something with a place.

She walked to it, and picked it up, and put it in her pocket, and counted twenty more, and threw it again.

"This is mad," said Calum, behind her.

"It is slow," she said. "Not the same thing."

The toggles said seven hundred. The ground under her left foot was rising. Very slightly, but it was rising, and she stopped and felt it, and kicked a lump loose, and it rolled away past her right boot. Left side up. Right side down.

"There," she said. "That's the Sneachda side going up. We're left. Now we turn right and walk along the hill, and we keep the up-slope at our backs."

She turned to face the way the lump had rolled. Twenty paces. She threw the clementine.

It went out, bright, and came down, and sat.

Twenty paces. She went to it, picked it up, counted, threw.

It went out and came down and sat.

Twenty paces. She threw the clementine.

It went out into the white. It did not come down. There was no sound — there would not have been, on snow — and there was no orange anywhere, and she stood and looked at the place where it should have been, and kept looking, because the eye does not like to believe that a thing has gone. Calum came up beside her, and she put out her arm across his chest without looking at him, the way her mother had at the kerb in Union Street.

"Where did it go?" he said.

"Down."

Neither of them moved. The snow hissed past at their knees, out into the white, and went on going.

She took a second clementine from the pocket and threw it again, softer, three metres, perhaps less. It landed. It sat. Then, very slowly, as she watched, it began to roll away from her, which a clementine on flat ground does not do. It rolled about a metre, and stopped, on the brim of something, and sat there, very small and very orange, in the middle of nothing.

Agnes let out her breath.

"Right," she said. "That's the Domhain."

She took the map out. She did not need it; she wanted something to do with her hands. On the map the col was a little saddle with the contour lines pinched together on both sides. Here, in the white, it was a clementine five metres away sitting on top of Loch Avon.

"We're on the col," she said. "Exactly where we should be. Six hundred metres from the lochan by my steps, and then left on purpose, and then right until the edge. The edge is here. So now we turn left, and walk along it, at twenty metres, with the edge on our right hand, until the ground starts to rise for the Stob. Then the bearing to the cairn."

Calum was still looking at the clementine.

"We'd have gone straight on," he said. "If we'd gone faster."

She did not answer that. It was not a question.

She did not go and get the clementine. She thought about it, briefly, because she was from Aberdeen, and then she left it there, sitting on the brim of the hat, for the wind to have.

---

The rest of it was only work. Twenty metres back from the edge and then along it, with the slope behind them, and then the slope beginning to climb, and the bearing for the cairn at Point 1141, which was a big cairn and came out of the white in the end like a bus coming out of fog, all at once and much closer than you thought. They stood beside it and Agnes moved all ten toggles back to the top of the cord. It was twenty to five. Then the ridge, the Fiacaill a' Choire Chais, which goes down north from the cairn with steep ground on the left and gentler ground on the right, and which you cannot miss once you are on it, because it is the only thing going down.

At about nine hundred metres they came out of the bottom of the cloud. It happened in a few steps. The white went grey and then thin, and then there was a horizon, and below them, very far, was Strathspey in the dusk: the black forest, the frozen loch at Glenmore, the lights of Aviemore in a long yellow string along the A9, and the car park underneath them with three cars in it, one of them theirs. Agnes stopped to look. You cannot see a lit town from up there in the evening and not stop.

Calum stopped beside her. He unzipped his jacket, and reached inside, and took out the phone. It had been against his chest for an hour and a half. He held it in both hands, the way you would hold a bird, and pressed the button, and the apple came up, and stayed.

The screen lit. The map came on. The blue dot was on the summit of Ben Macdui, where it had last seen them, at fourteen forty-one, with the battery at nineteen per cent. It sat there for a moment, quite certain. Then it began, slowly, to search.

He watched it. Agnes watched him watch it.

He did not wait for it to find them. He turned it off, and put it back inside his jacket, and took a clementine from the side pocket of her pack, and peeled it, and gave her half.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Fermiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Enrico Fermi, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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