Hellsborough Exposed — survival-tips

A scratcher does not watch you; it watches whatever you cannot see yet — cat-sized and tabby-marked, sat on a wall holding one angle for the better part of an hour on a hedge that appears to contain nothing at all. Corner one and it will scratch you precisely once and go straight back to watching, which is the whole of its violence; the danger was never the scratcher. Use them as a compass, and if a scratcher's gaze swings onto you mid-watch, follow its new line before you do anything else — something changed, and it noticed before you did.

Tom Calver, out among the settlements past the treeline, was learning which ground to keep off, and the local woman Cath was his teacher: "Don't read it," Cath said. "You know not to by now." "I know not to," said Tom. "They're not a ring. The ring just sits and goes again. This is one of them moving — you don't get many. The dead-still on a mover runs out further than the sitting ones. Twenty foot off the line of it, near enough, before the frost takes it back. You learn the distance so you know how far back is back."

He had read the medical literature on this once and had decided not to read it again.

Pip's field note on the Loxley Overhang: count the pulse rate on any yellow-wagtail you encounter along the wall, and you'll have a rough estimate of how many reasons the path has been quietly abandoned are currently aware of your presence. If you can't catch a yellow-wagtail, the count is almost certainly higher than you'd like.

Dyapnids don't appear on any DPDC leisure map of The Dark Peak, and that is not accidental. Shad and I made it out to Mam Tor during a thin-murk Windstrom day and I'll say this plainly: cross the fence — the one the signs insist is to keep animals out rather than you in — and whatever finds you will not be on the visitor trail. Whether you'd even be missed afterwards is, apparently, a separate administrative question.