A Night in the Snow or A Struggle for Life

by E. Donald Carr

Of course my adventure excited great interest at the Crown Hotel, when it was fully understood what had happened to me.  It was just two o’clock in the afternoon when I reached that place, and as I had left Ratlinghope at four o’clock on the previous afternoon, I had been walking uninterruptedly for twenty-two hours, excepting the quarter of an hour I had rested at the Carding Mill.  My good friends at the hotel discovered that my clothes were very wet, for they had been frozen before and were now thawed, so I was dressed up in the landlord’s garments.  The effect must have been very ludicrous, for he was a much stouter man than I was at any time, and now I had shrunk away to nothing.  It will not therefore be wondered at that people when they saw me declared they should not have known who I was.

The surgeon having come and dressed my finger, and warned me to keep away from the fire and hot water, and having prescribed some hot brandy and water, I started in my fly on my homeward journey.  Very slow was our progress.  We had taken spades with us, and many times the driver and the man who accompanied him had to dig a way for the fly to get through.  Most trying was the long delay thus caused to a man who knew that in his own home he must probably be reckoned among the dead; but there was no help for it, and at last Leebotwood was reached, the place where the lane to Wolstaston turned off from the main road, and where I was to leave the fly, and, as I hoped, ride home.

The Post Office is at Leebotwood, and having given orders there that any letters coming from my house should be stopped, I was helped on my horse, and, accompanied by the man, began to ascend the hill.  I had not gone a hundred yards, when it became evident that it would be impossible to ride far, and that I should be obliged to walk again, so the horse was sent back to Leebotwood by a man whom we met, and I started again on my own feet.  Just at this time we met another man coming down over the fields from Wolstaston.  He had letters with him to post; those letters were from my home.  They were to say that I had been lost in the snow storm, that every effort had been made to find me, that they had proved fruitless, and that there was no hope left.  I sent this messenger back again pretty quickly, and told him to go home as fast as he could and say I was coming.  This news reached the village about half an hour before I could get up there myself, and as may be supposed there was great rejoicing.  So completely had all hope of my safety been given up, that to my people it seemed almost like a resurrection from the dead.

They had made the greatest efforts to find me.  Twice a party had gone up the hill on the Sunday night to the limit of the enclosed ground, and stayed there calling and shouting, till, as one of them said to me, they felt that if they had stayed there another ten minutes, they would have been frozen to death.  The second time they went up that night, they actually got on to the open moorland some two or three hundred yards, but here they were in imminent danger of being lost themselves.  One of them indeed declared that he could not return, and would have been lost had not his companions insisted on his struggling back with them.  Human effort could do no more, and they made their toilsome way home prostrated with fatigue.

It was a fearful moment, they tell me, when the Rectory house was closed up for the night, the shutters fastened, and curtains drawn, with the fate of its master unknown.  The helpless watchers could only wait and count the weary hours, keeping food hot for the wanderer, who they feared would never return, and unable till the morning to plan any further efforts for his rescue.  The awful wind raged on, sometimes assuming to the ears of the excited listeners the sound of rolling wheels and horses’ feet, startling them into expectation, though they knew that the tramp of an army would have fallen noiseless on that depth of snow.  Then again, it rose like shrieks and wild calls of distress, and every now and then would smite the house with a buffet, as though it would level it with the ground.

The storm lulled at length, as the hours went slowly by.  Morning came and the men prepared to resume their almost hopeless search once more.  They started, about twenty strong, armed with spades and shovels, and determined first of all to cut their way to Ratlinghope, thinking that perhaps I had remained there all night.  They worked with all their might, but the snow was deeper than ever, and their progress was laborious and very slow.  Though they had started as soon as it was light in the morning, they did not reach Ratlinghope till noon, and then their last hope was dashed to the ground, for they heard that I had started the previous afternoon, though pressed to remain in the village for the night.  Great was the consternation of the Ratlinghope people when they heard the news.  They knew the hill well, and said with one consent, “If Mr. Carr was on the Long Mynd last night, he is a dead man.”  This conviction too was strengthened by the sad fact, that that very morning the dead body of a man, whom we all knew well, had been found in the road frozen to death, not more than one hundred and fifty yards from a small hamlet in the parish of Ratlinghope, known as “The Bridges.”  Poor Easthope, for such was his name, was a journeyman shoemaker by trade.  He owned a few ponies which were on the hill, and he had been looking after these on the Sunday.  I suppose he was much exhausted by this, but he had safely reached his daughter’s house in the evening, which he subsequently left to go to the place where he worked, no great distance off.  He was found, as I have said, the next morning frozen to death on the turnpike road.  It is conjectured that he either sat down to rest or fell down, and that he speedily became insensible.  I think this fact in itself is sufficient to prove that, had I given way to the temptation to rest, I too should have lost my life.

The searching party, reinforced by most of the able-bodied men in Ratlinghope, beat that part of the hill lying between Ratlinghope and Wolstaston thoroughly, thinking that I must be somewhere in the tract between the two places, never supposing that I could have wandered as far away as I actually had done.  The fog was so thick that it was only by keeping near to each other and shouting constantly that this party was able to keep together.  I need not say that they failed to discover any trace of me, and about three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out and exhausted, they returned to the Rectory with the worst tidings.  “He must be dead,” they said, “he must be dead; it is not possible that any human creature could have lived through such a night.”  And it was upon the receipt of these tidings that the letters were sent off which I so fortunately succeeded in stopping.  Half-an-hour after, the news came that I was returning, and in another half-hour I was at home.  This was between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, rather more than twenty-seven hours from the time I had left Wolstaston.

My friends tell me that had they not known who it was, they would scarcely have recognised me.  Dressed in another man’s clothes, exceedingly thin, with eyes fearfully bloodshot, and fingers stiff and shrunken, the middle finger more resembling a dead stick, they say, with the gray and wrinkled bark on, than the living member of a human body, this is scarcely to be wondered at.  I was glad to go to bed at once, and to have my feet and hands well rubbed with snow.  This, it should be well known, is the only thing to be done in cases of frost bite.  Had I put them in hot water, I should in all probability have lost my fingers and toes; they would have sloughed off.  I know of several cases where this has happened; indeed, I heard of one quite lately, for the gardener of a friend of mine in Warwickshire had his hands frost-bitten while throwing the snow off the roof of a house during this last winter, and injudiciously putting them into hot water, the result has been that he has lost the ends of all his fingers, to the first joint.  In my case, I am thankful to say I knew better than to do this, and by the use of cold water and continued friction have succeeded in restoring my hands in a great measure.  They have still not nearly as much sensation in them as before, but this will return with time.  During the last few weeks, gorse pricks have been working out of my hands and feet and legs by hundreds, though at first, from the numbness of the skin, I was quite unconscious of them.  It is not to be wondered at that I should have picked these up in great numbers whilst walking through the gorse bushes without my boots, and clutching at them as I fell in hopes of saving myself.

Such are the details of my “Night in the Snow,” and my most wonderful preservation through it and the following day.  I trust that no one who may chance to read these pages will ever be placed in a similar position; but should it so happen, I hope that the remembrance of my adventure will occur to them; for surely it teaches, as plainly as anything can, that even in the most adverse circumstances no one need ever despair; and shows how an individual of no unusual physical powers may, by God’s help, resist the overwhelming temptation to sleep which is usually so fatal to those who are lost in the snow.