studying the guide book. I listened idly to their comments. Did all men talk like this when they imagined themselves alone?

I suppose it must have been roughly an hour and a half when the others came down with the harness and relieved me of my charge.

When the signal was given to pull, the response from five hundred feet away was fantastic. We started to shoot up the cliff like mercury in a barometer. One had to watch out for the overhangs, otherwise there was a very real chance of breaking one's neck. Sometimes the sheep was on its rescuer's shoulders as he climbed, sometimes he walked up almost vertical walls holding her in his arms (she was on a rope, too, of course). The other man and I swung and swayed on our spider threads of nylon, dancing gaily across the cliff to lend a hand if the sheep struggled on his back, or when he needed a rest.

The men pulling me were so strong I couldn't cope; sometimes I had to shout for a rest too.

I came over the top like a cork out of a bottle, to be ordered unceremoniously off the ledge, so I staggered to the summit and collapsed. Someone put the yearling in my arms. Two girls came up and asked me what we were doing. I opened my mouth to speak, and the sheep came up and hit me on the ear with her horn. It was exquisitely painful and my eyes filled with tears. The girls went away.

Then we started carrying them down to the Land-Rover, Half-way down the scree gully I said, “You know, I think I ought to carry one“. Lees was in full accord. No now, I said, cursing myself, I shall sprain my ankle. Go one, relieve the chap behind - you need only carry it a little way. Show willing.

My teeth chattered in fury. Show willing! With the crux of Central Gully yawning below me for two hours! I took the sheep and carried it the last long lap to the Land-Rover, carrying until I was so overcome I could no longer refuse offers to spell me but merely glared, speechless, and pushed on, squelching through the mud, looking and smelling more like a sheep with every moment.

The sheep are taken down to the farm partly because it can be fatal to turn them loose on plentiful grass after their weeks of semi-starvation on the ledges, but also because, if frightened on top, they will try to return to their ledge, as if they felt that only there will they find security. Continue to Chapter 9