With a view to the next high

these sensations outweighs the other for John Grieve. In the perfect challenge the first quality leads to the other two, achieving such precise balance of emotion there is a strange equilibrium to be found in risk.

Grieve for the past three years has been leader of Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team, a man who seems the polar opposite of Hamish MacInnes, the team's austere and autocratic founder. Like all the 29 others in the group, Grieve works unpaid to try to avert calamity and mend the careless mistake. But he shudders when you ask for his strategy on safety. It is not his business, he says, to issue rules and, thus, he is a paradox: the non-interventionist who goes to the rescue. But isn't it negligent of him not to distribute his knowledge as warnings? ''The media always want me to do little homilies on the dangers of the mountains at this moment or that,'' he muses almost wearily.''But we're not guides. We simply don't see that as our role.''

Grieve points to the fact that there are bodies, like the Scottish Mountain Safety Group, whose purpose is to improve public awareness of the hazards, and he has no problem with that kind of informed counselling.

''In our team we have many expert climbers and

others who don't climb at all because effective rescue work is made up of very varied expertise. However, we are adamant that our job is not

to preach.''

He was especially annoyed, the other week, by the criticism levelled at a French group of teenagers and their instructor who were in the Mamores near Kinlochleven, when the weather changed and difficulties closed in.

''These people were guests in our country. Every year you get hundreds of climbers in trouble in the French Alps. They're rescued and they're never criticised, yet here this party were vilified in the press, even though they hadn't done anything particularly wrong. One of them had become ill. It could happen to anybody.''

There is an almost Zen self-containment about Grieve's philosophy. He would never interfere, he says, if he came across an adult acting incautiously on a hill.

''The other day I watched

a couple, a man

and a woman, who I was absolutely convinced were going to get themselves killed. They were only 5ft away from me, just going up with no ice-axe or anything. In fact there was nothing I could have done. I just came out of the mist, and there they were, actually digging holes out of the snow with their fingers, and she was crying.''

Below was an 800ft drop on to a steep snow slope and

boulders. So, in the circumstances wasn't Grieve's passivity alarming, even callous? ''Well, if I'd had a rope with me I'd have shouted to them, and if they'd said they wanted a hand that would have been different. As it happened, the couple overcame the problems, but to tell the truth, I wasn't too happy with my own position on the hill that day.''

An accomplished climber since his late teens, Grieve is instantly affable but low-key, a leader who seems to work with his colleagues by telepathy rather than by shouting orders from a van. Married to an art teacher and with an adult daughter and son, he, also, is a teacher by training, but he now runs his own seafood company, razor clams the speciality and Hong Kong the main market. Glencoe call-outs, though, take precedence over everything, and even away from his usual habitat Grieve still wears the colours of the mountain, arriving in Glasgow on business in a fern green T-shirt and slacks; barefooted, too, except for loafers, as if the only socks that count are those impenetrably knitted up for booting.

MacInnes, gingery, stern, the Fox of the Glen who is internationally regarded as

a superlative mountaineer, founded the Glencoe team in 1961, and it has existed on public donations ever since. Long ago it took up squatters rights in the local police station but it intends to build a neighbouring headquarters. First, however, it must raise the required #64,000 which means that Grieve and his men are in that long line of lottery pleaders.

MacInnes quit noisily

in 1994, claiming that a previously agreed BBC documentary on the team's work would exploit victims. But raging beneath the surface was another more significant row concerning the style and texture of leadership. The MacInnes loyalists backed his dictatorial approach, while the rebels, many senior members of the team, believed that after 33 years democracy should hold the floor.

''You can kid yourself that you're in rescue for the greater good,'' Grieve says, ''but the reality is that you're there because you, the rescuer, get something out of it. And there's no doubt that you do crave the big technical operation, something where you can use your skills to the full, applying a lot of difficult rope work, for example, and taking someone off the hill in absolutely atrocious conditions.'' Does that mean the ideal scenario must also be the worst? The very thought seems dreadful, yet just as mountaineering becomes an addiction, so, too, does the very urgency of rescuing. ''Obviously people's motives for going out vary a lot, but, yes, danger is often part of it. A buzz goes round the team, and you do push your luck, tackling areas you'd normally think twice about before climbing.'' Grieve can deploy his team to Glencoe's lower slopes within eight minutes

of a call-out, although the quickest access route is now locked against them by a Belgian estate owner, Count Adolph de Spoelberch, who doesn't seem to comprehend the common importance of that small swathe of his land which hitherto had been the parking space for team vehicles, and

a rescue helicopter. ''As a compromise the police have now been given a key to the gate for emergency use, but even so, obtaining it can still hold things up.''

In effect, though, the team's activities extend beyond the mountains to include random community work. ''We have searched for elderly people who've wandered away from their homes, looked for missing children, and we generally assist when anyone in trouble needs a fast response.'' All the more strange, then, that the team's request for planning permission for proper Glencoe headquarters should have met with such fierce, long-running opposition, the battle only won on the third application last year. ''We'd always thought we were part of the community but much of the problem, I think, came from those who thought that only they had the right to run things. And there were others whose attitude to visiting climbers in trouble is 'leave the bloody fools up there'. Yet a lot of people in the village rely on climbers for B&B.''

Two springs ago the team recovered three bodies six

weeks after a father, his son,

and a friend

had been killed

by an avalanche in Coire Na

Tulaich on 3345ft Buachaille Etive Mor. Grieve and his crew had searched for the party in darkness on that February day of the accident, and, in fact, they had come within seconds of the whole team being wiped out.

''The victims had been practising ice-axe techniques on the lower slopes of the corrie. By the time we arrived. there had already been an avalanche and four of our blokes went ahead to probe around on the tip of it.'' Suddenly one of the men sensed something, no more than a shiver in the air, and they ran back just escaping the biggest avalanche ever recorded in Scotland.

''The crashing snow passed their heels, it was as close as that. If they hadn't alerted the rest of us, we'd have joined them on that spot and very probably all 25 of us out that day would have perished. So, the potential for disaster is certainly there.'' But Grieve still won't support the fast-reflex comment which fulminates about those who put other lives in jeopardy. There is a banality, he feels, about such outrage at the ready.

He says: ''Last year I was solo-ing an easy climb but one that's very steep, and I asked a

couple of girls ahead if it

was okay if I passed them. That was fine, they said, but when I came back down, their group leader, who'd been doing a lot of officious shouting, announced in my direction: 'At the risk of embarr- assing you, you're the sort

of person who causes the mountain rescue team a lot

of trouble.'

''Well, I couldn't resist it, so I replied: 'At the risk of embarrassing you, I am the mountain rescue team.' '' But a wretched shift in the wind snatched Grieve's irony away from the climbers. Big Chief Know-it-All got the message, though, and he had the decency to look chastened.