As Russian paratroopers cut off her last line of retreat, our correspondent was forced to flee with Chechen help by the only route left open: a range of 12,000ft mountains

My journey across the mountains from Chechnya to safety in Georgia began four days before Christmas. It continued for eight increasingly desperate days, ending in rescue by helicopter last week from a snow-bound field in Georgia.

It was a trip that was not supposed to be necessary. I had been smuggled into the country from Georgia in a four-wheel-drive vehicle to report first-hand from the towns and villages under bombardment. I had planned to leave by road. But then Russian paratroopers seized Melkhist, an ancient centre known as the Dead City, taking control of the only road to Georgia. They shot at any vehicles that tried to pass. I was trapped.

On the way in, Russian fighter planes had attacked and destroyed the vehicle I was travelling in and had returned again and again, firing missiles into the field where I had taken refuge under a stunted beech tree. The pilots tried to scare us into making a run for it so that we would be easy targets.

Sitting in a mountain hideout, we agreed that a trek over the peaks was preferable to being hunted from the skies.

For hours on the day we hoped to set out, Tuesday December 21, planes attacked the slopes nearby with rockets that set brush and trees on fire in great arcs of flame. We left our hideout just after sunset.

Within an hour we were zigzagging up a mountain on a 6in-wide path covered in snow and ice. I was carrying a pack with a satellite telephone and a computer and wearing a flak jacket. I felt every ounce. I regretted every cigarette I had ever smoked - and I had smoked a lot in the past few days: cheap Russian tobacco that gave some respite from the bombs and the decisions.

About midnight, after almost six hours of walking, we reached the top of a peak, where a roofless stone hut provided shelter from the wind.

The following day, travelling up a river, I stepped in the wrong spot and plunged through the ice up to the hip into the raging torrent below. We had now been walking for 24 hours. As night fell, our guide, Magomet Amin Katayev, lit a fire on the ice of the frozen river and set off on his own. He returned at about 10pm and told us that he had found the pass.

The next 12 hours were passed in a daze, one foot in front of the other, up and over another mountain. There was a pile of stones ahead - the Georgian border. Two shots rang out. We dived into the snow and another two shots sounded. It seemed unfair that here, yards from the border, we would die. Magomet began shouting in Chechen and the shots stopped. But we had not yet reached safety.

Despair for the first time set in. I fell asleep on an exposed bluff, impervious to the wind and cold. When I awoke, Magomet had found an abandoned shepherd’s hut.

It was Christmas. The symbolism of spending it in a shepherd’s hut seemed a better omen than the graves at the start of our trek. I got a call out over the satellite phone to the Sunday Times foreign desk to say we had crossed the border. For the next two days we lived in the shepherd’s hut on flour and water. I supplemented the porridge once with wild onions. They tasted horrible but they would give us some vitamins. Magomet gave me a pistol loaded with nine bullets - telling me not to shoot a wild animal until it was 10 metres away, but to shoot a man the moment one appeared – and set off to find a way forward.

After his return, we walked down a river valley into Georgia and found Giveri, a collection of dark stone houses. All were open and unlocked but had been abandoned for the winter. We found a house with beds, a stove, flour and a can of peas.

On December 28 a storm set in and we were down to the last of our flour. We decided to try to walk out.

We walked until an hour before dark, when we heard a helicopter. We waved madly. The helicopter ducked its nose and landed below us in a field.

I walked down the slope to be greeted by an Ernest Hemingway figure with a white beard and blue snow jacket, who said: “Jack Hariman, American embassy. Are we glad to find you . . . ”

Marie Colvin has been a Sunday Times foreign correspondent since 1986. She has won many awards, including foreign reporter of the year

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