Though I missed the freedom to roam that summer brought there was a part of me that enjoyed the austerity of winter. Summertime, and the living was easy, but I didn’t come here for an easy life, I came here for a hard life freely chosen, and could not complain if I found it. The stream of friends who had wanted to come for weekend visits in the summer would dry to a trickle, and then it was just me, my own devices, and the elements. The few friends who attempted a winter visit mostly discreetly decided that the next time they came back it would be when the weather was better. I don’t blame them; the cold got into your bones, and no matter how many logs you threw on the fire, you never felt truly warm. The only person I regularly saw was the farmer, up to check on his sheep. In the wintertime my world shrank; as the nights drew in, I drew in too, closer to home and hearth. The hills became forbidding and lifeless; the pipits and larks that teemed there in summer had abandoned them. Just a few crows, perhaps a circling buzzard, and the occasional winter snipe that would jink away in zigzags, tower, then drop back to the ground a couple of hundred yards ahead. Everything else had headed to warmer climes, or at least to lower ground or the coast.
At home I would huddle close to the fire. There was a coal fire in my bedroom, but there simply wasn’t enough draw so the room became too smoky and I seldom used it. Instead I would keep piling on the covers until the day that the spider’s web of rime on the inside of the windows, my frozen breath, was too thick to see through. Then I would move downstairs. I had a single bed on castors that I used as a sofa, and I would roll that close to the fire at night, and for the rest of the winter I would live in just the one room. The bats had left long ago to their underground winter roost, and the mice no longer troubled me; I was alone save for the little clusters of peacock and tortoiseshell butterflies that clustered in the corners of the upstairs ceilings, sleeping the winter away. I would have to keep an eye on them in the spring, to let them out when they woke.
In my first full winter at the cottage, almost on a whim, I decided to follow the birds. Not the migrants, the international travellers that had gone far south, but the moorland waders and birds of prey that had deserted my hills for the coast. I was brought up by the sea and missed it sometimes. So I walked down the hillside, crossed the river to the main road and hitched a ride north-west. First I stopped off at Aberystwyth, to watch the choughs on the sea cliffs. Choughs are our rarest and most elegant crow, glossy black with a long slender red bill and broad butterfly wings. They floated weightlessly in the updraught, calling continually, and fed in little packs on the clifftop fields. Then I headed back to the road north, to reach the estuary before nightfall. It was a cold January day, the ground was iron beneath my feet, so when I got there I booked a night in a bed and breakfast.
It was a beautiful spot. The estuary was surrounded by snow-capped peaks. Thick oak woods led you to the salt marsh, the reed beds, and pools still unfrozen in spite of the deep frost. And beyond that the mudflats, teeming with flocks of waders. Almost the first bird I saw was a glaucous gull, a rare vagrant that had followed the icy north wind down from the Arctic. Skeins of Greenland white-fronted geese lit on the marsh, gaggling and cackling, and snake-necked red-breasted mergansers dived repeatedly in the pools. A little female merlin raced back and forth along the woodland edge, never resting. Out on the flats a lone peregrine, a tiercel, was sitting on a post preening himself. He could have been the bird I watched regularly at my local eyrie. He was being, I would have to say, harried, by a male hen harrier, the palest of pastel greys save for his black wing-tips, gracefully swooping towards the falcon, over and over, then sweeping away. The pere-grine seemed not to care, seemed not even to notice, he just carried on preening himself calmly, and eventually the harrier tired of this sport and went back to quartering the reed beds in search of an unwary bunting. The peregrine shook his feathers, lifted from his post and flew low and slow along the water’s edge, flocks of waders scattering all around him. He dropped slightly and scooped up a redshank. He had not even been hunting, but had virtually tripped over a free meal. There were rich pickings to be had here. At dusk, a barn owl emerged from its roost in the tangled roots of an old oak. It waited there patiently, looking out inscrutably as the sun finally set and darkness fell. Then it lifted off, pale and ghostly and totally silent, and began to hunt, criss-crossing the marsh in systematic transects in search of its prey. And with that, I left and headed back to my own eyrie in the far hills.
Deep on a winter’s night I was woken by bloodcurdling screams. If I had been of a more timid disposition it might have unnerved me. The mating call of the fox — their season is the dead of winter. I got up and gently pulled aside the curtains. A pair of foxes was mating on the track right outside the cottage; in the daytime they would keep their distance, but the darkness had made them bold.
The stoat that I saw in the rain on New Year’s Day I didn’t see again until the following New Year’s Eve. It was a fine winter morning and I was sitting out on my porch. The stoat came bouncing up the hillside like Tigger, alongside the fence. Just across my track was a boulder, and it hopped up on that, stood up on its hind legs and cocked its head from side to side, weighing me up, twitching its short black-tipped tail. And then, having seen enough, it bounded back down the field and was lost behind a turn in the fence. I remembered reading as a child of an old gamekeepers’ wheeze, to call stoats by impersonating the squeals of an injured rabbit. I had absolutely no idea what an injured rabbit sounds like, but I stood up, and by sucking through my teeth made, well, a noise. And incredibly it worked. The stoat came back, reared up on to its hind legs again, and stared at me intently, as if to say: Who are you? And what on earth do you think you’re doing?
Stoats are notoriously brave and inquisitive. I remember once in Sweden I took a rowboat out across a lake to a small forested island. While I was sitting on the rocky beach, a little head popped up from behind a fallen tree trunk, then disappeared, then popped up again. It was a young stoat playing peekaboo with me. I stood up to get a better view, and it ran over, nipped me on the toe of my shoe, then dashed off again. It did this three times in all before it got bored; there is no end to their boldness.
The winter season had its rewards. When I woke to a new, softer light and an unmistakable muffled silence, and knew that the first snow of winter had fallen during the night, it was like being a child again. And once or twice each winter, the wind would turn and the temperature suddenly plummet, and I would emerge into a crystal world. Every blade of grass, every strand of gossamer would be sheathed in frozen dew. My breath was a cloud of steam and the ground crunched satisfyingly beneath my feet, like I was walking on broken glass. The woods were completely silent, and completely still. It felt as though a moment in time had been frozen, and the world was holding its breath.
But the world does not stop and start. The seasons are not discrete, they have no true beginning and end, they merge into one another and overlap, all part of the flow. On a mild Christmas Day, I watched a bat circling in the valley in broad daylight, a pipistrelle flushed from hibernation by a warm snap, and was surprised by a sudden cascade of birdsong. A wren, with such a big voice for such a tiny bird. And though the birds might start singing to greet the spring before the year is out, there was one thing I could be sure of: it would snow in spring, in March or even April. It came every year without fail, that last fall of snow. The locals even had a name for it: lambing snow.