Story 20

— Am Fear Liath Mòr of the Cairngorms —

c. 1972

T

he Cairngorms rise blunt and massive over Speyside, a plateau of granite and peat where the wind never quite stops and the light changes hour by hour without warning. In summer the high corries hold snow in shadowed pockets; in winter the plateau becomes a white sea of drifts that can swallow a man to the neck in minutes. Climbers describe it with respect bordering on dread. They say the mountains are old — older than the rock itself — and that something watches from the granite tors, patient, silent, and vast.

Dr. Alistair Grant, a lecturer in psychology from Aberdeen, went solo into the Cairngorms in the late autumn of 1972 to test a theory. He was forty-one, meticulous, distrustful of anything that could not be measured. His paper-in-progress contended that “Big Grey Man” sightings — reported since the 1920s — were a convergence of exhaustion, hypoxia, and infrasound-induced panic: the mountains themselves producing low-frequency vibrations that triggered the fight-or-flight response and summoned a spectral presence in the peripheral vision. He carried a notebook, a tape recorder, a barometer, and a small rucksack. No tent; he intended to bivouac in a snow-hole if necessary and return the following day.

He left the car park at Linn of Dee beneath a sky the colour of wet slate. The trail followed the Lui Water for a mile and rose steadily toward the plateau. By mid-afternoon he had arrived at the broad shoulder of Ben Macdui, where the wind cut clean across the granite and the world fell away on every side into grey nothing. Near the summit cairn he set up his equipment: anemometer, recorder running, barometric readings logged every fifteen minutes. The temperature hovered just below freezing. He noted the silence — profound, almost liquid. No birds, no distant deer calls. Only the wind, steady and low, humming through the rocks like a distant engine.

At dusk the mist thickened. Visibility dropped to twenty feet. Alistair put on his headlamp and kept taking readings. The tape recorder captured his voice: calm, clinical.

“Wind speed seventeen knots, gusting twenty-three. Atmospheric pressure 987 millibars. No auditory anomalies beyond expected wind shear.”


Then the footsteps began. Heavy, deliberate, coming from the north-east. Each step crunched snow and stone, spaced as though taken by legs far longer than his own. Not running. Not hurried. Simply approaching.

Alistair froze. The recorder kept turning. He spoke into it: “Audible footfalls, approximately thirty metres distant. Cadence suggests large mass — perhaps a red deer, distorted by echo and terrain.” The steps continued. Closer now. Twenty metres. Fifteen. The rhythm never varied: left, right, left, right — each impact sending a faint tremor through the ground. He turned the headlamp toward the sound. The beam cut white tunnels through swirling mist, illuminating nothing but granite and snow.

The footsteps stopped. Silence returned, deeper than before. His own heartbeat seemed loud in his ears. Then the footsteps resumed — behind him. He spun. Nothing. Only mist and the pale disc of his light reflecting off ice-rimed boulders. The recorder captured his breathing, quicker now. “Possible auditory hallucination induced by isolation and low-frequency wind vibration. Consistent with infrasound hypothesis.”

He sat on his pack and forced himself to breathe slowly. The wind rose a fraction, carrying a low, almost subsonic hum that vibrated in his chest. He told himself it was the plateau’s natural acoustics: wind funnelling through corries, resonating against granite. The footsteps returned — closer this time. Ten metres. Five. He could feel each impact through the soles of his boots.

He stood. “Who’s there?” His voice cracked on the second word. No answer. Only the footsteps — now circling slowly, wide arcs that kept him at the centre. The mist parted for an instant.

In the headlamp’s beam he saw it: tall — far taller than any man — grey, indistinct, humanoid in outline but blurred at the edges as though made of the mist itself. Shoulders broad, arms long, head featureless save for the suggestion of a face turned toward him. It did not move when he looked directly at it; it simply stood, immense and still, watching. Alistair’s legs locked. His mind raced through explanations: shadow cast by a boulder, pareidolia, oxygen deprivation. Yet the thing was there — solid enough to block the wind, tall enough that he had to tilt his head back to find where its outline disappeared into the swirling grey.


The recorder hissed. His voice, when it came, was small: “Visual phenomenon confirmed. Approximately three metres in height. No facial detail. No movement beyond initial approach.” The figure took one step forward. The ground shook faintly. Alistair stepped back. His heel caught a rock; he stumbled, dropped the recorder. It skittered across the snow, still running.


Panic arrived then — clean, animal, unstoppable. He turned and ran. The plateau offered no cover. He ran blind through the mist, boots slipping on ice, lungs burning. Behind him the footsteps followed — not fast, not chasing, simply present. Always the same distance. Always matching his pace.

He ran for what felt like hours. The cold deepened. His fingers numbed inside gloves. The mist thickened until he could not see his own hands. He stopped, gasping, doubled over. The footsteps stopped too. Silence. He listened. Nothing but his own ragged breathing and the low wind-hum. Then, from directly behind him — close enough to feel the displacement of air — a single, enormous footfall.

He did not turn. He could not. He began to walk again — slowly this time, deliberately. The footsteps resumed, matching him step for step. He walked through the night.

Dawn came grey and reluctant. The mist thinned. He found himself far from the summit, near the edge of the Lairig Ghru, the great pass that cuts through the range. The footsteps had ceased sometime before first light. He descended to the road at Coylumbridge, frost-bitten, exhausted, clothes stiff with ice. A passing gamekeeper found him sitting on the verge, staring at nothing. Alistair was taken to hospital in Aviemore. Doctors treated hypothermia and shock. He spoke little. When he did, it was only to repeat: “It walked with me. All night. It never hurried. It never left.”

He returned to Aberdeen. The paper was never finished. The tape from the recorder — when played back — contained his own voice, wind noise, and, in the final minutes before he dropped it, a single sound: a low, resonant footfall, impossibly large, impossibly close, recorded on a cheap cassette microphone that should never have captured it.

Alistair never climbed Ben Macdui again. Yet on certain still days, when the plateau is quiet and the mist lies low, walkers still report it: the footsteps behind them, heavy and unhurried, always at the edge of sight. No one runs anymore. They walk — slowly, steadily

— until the sound fades. Because Am Fear Liath Mòr does not chase. He accompanies. And when the mist closes in and the wind hums low through the granite, he is already there — grey, vast, silent — walking beside you, step for step, until you reach the edge of the high ground and step back into the world below.


Some say he is the mountain’s loneliness given form. Others that he is a guardian, warning those who climb too high, too alone. Alistair Grant, in the years before he stopped speaking of it entirely, had only one thing to add when pressed: “He was never trying to frighten me. He was only… keeping me company. And that was worse.”

Because the horror is not in being hunted. It is in realising you were never alone up there at all.