Multiple-choice reading

At half past two on a February morning, Gareth Pryce’s phone buzzes on the kitchen table. He has been asleep for less than three hours, after a long evening helping a ewe give birth to twins. He reads the message twice, pulls on the waterproof trousers that hang permanently by the back door and is in his truck within four minutes. Two walkers are lost somewhere on the ridge above his farm, and the cloud has come down.

Gareth, 46, has been a volunteer with his local mountain rescue team for twenty-one years. Like the other thirty or so members, he is not paid. During the day he runs a hill farm with four hundred sheep, which his grandfather bought in the 1950s. The two jobs, he says, fit together better than people expect. “I know this hillside the way other people know their own living room,” he says. “I’ve walked every wall and stream on it looking for sheep. Looking for people isn’t so different, except people panic and sheep don’t.”

That local knowledge matters. On the night of the February call-out, the walkers had followed a path that disappears into a boggy area which, on the map, looks perfectly safe. Gareth guessed where they had gone wrong before the team had even left the car park. They were found two hours later, cold and frightened but unhurt, sheltering behind a rock less than a kilometre from where he had predicted.

Not every rescue ends so well, and Gareth is honest about the difficult nights. He describes them in a few quiet words and then changes the subject. What he prefers to talk about is how the work has changed. When he joined, the team had a handful of radios and an old ambulance that broke down regularly. Today they use drones with heat cameras and can locate a lost walker’s phone. “The equipment’s brilliant,” he says, “but it doesn’t carry anyone down a mountain. You still need eight people and a stretcher.”

He is less enthusiastic about one modern trend. More and more of the people the team rescues are, in his words, “well-equipped and badly prepared”. They have expensive jackets and a map on their phone, but no idea how quickly the weather can turn or how long a walk will take in snow. “Their phone battery dies at four o’clock, it’s dark at five, and they’ve no torch,” he says. “I don’t blame anyone for needing help. I just wish they’d done a bit more homework before they set off.”

Being on call at any hour has a cost, and much of it falls on his family. His wife, Bethan, runs the farm alone whenever he is called out, which has included Christmas Day and their daughter’s eighteenth birthday party. She jokes that she married two men, the farmer and the rescuer, and only ever sees one of them. Gareth admits he has thought about stopping, especially after a hard winter. Each time, though, something keeps him going: a card through the letterbox, or a walker who comes back a year later to shake his hand.

As for the February walkers, they sent the team a donation and a photograph of themselves on the summit in sunshine, taken on a second attempt that summer. Gareth has pinned it to the kitchen wall, next to a calendar showing lambing dates. “That’s the best bit,” he says. “Not finding them. Seeing them come back.”