Mostly I stayed in the first of these fields; it felt like my own special place and was the favoured haunt of the winter woodcock. As I walked around the field, they would flush from beneath my feet. They were mysterious, wise-looking birds, with their steep foreheads and long straight bills that they held pointed almost straight downwards as they flew. I never saw them on the ground, their camouflage was so effective, their mottled russet browns a perfect facsimile of dead bracken. The second they touched down they simply disappeared. They trusted this camouflage implicitly too; they only flushed when there was a serious risk they would be trodden on. Often their wings would brush against me as they rose; hundreds of times I must have unknowingly walked within inches of them.
On my first winter at the cottage there were more wintering woodcock than there ever have been since, yet though I flushed them on every walk it was months before I finally saw one grounded. I was walking on the eastern side of my mountain. Here the flank of the mountain is almost sheer and there are great views of the river far below, though in the summer the bracken grows head-high and you see nothing. There are just a few precarious sheep trails along this hillside, and it feels as though if you slipped you would roll all the way to the bottom. I was picking my way along one of these trails on my way to one of my local badger setts, wanting to check if they had emerged from their slumbers yet. And then I caught a glint at my feet. It was an eye, and what I had seen was my own reflection moving in a shiny black eye. I leaned in closer. The eye was a perfect globe, and in it I could see the entire valley in miniature. Painstakingly, around this shining eye, I was able to reconstruct the shape of a bird in the litter of dead bracken. And then it suddenly flushed, without apparent alarm, only to drop back to the ground fifty yards ahead. It could have been five yards, but still I would never have found it again. It struck me that in all my walks on my hill, I only ever flushed woodcock here on the eastern side, even though there were lots of other places all around the fringes of the hillside that seemed on the face of it equally suitable. There was a certain logic to it. Woodcock are neither day-birds nor night-birds; they are crepuscular, creatures of the half-light, active only around dawn and dusk. At nightfall, these eastern slopes would be the first places to fall into a deep enough shadow for them to rise, and in the very early morning would be the first places on the hill to become light enough for them to wake and begin their inscrutable cycle once again.
My first two winters at Penlan were relatively mild. There may have been weeks of snow in total, but there were thaws between the snowfalls. It was the third winter that was the killer. The snow would drift down the hillside in the night, and when I opened my back door in the morning I would be faced with a waist-high wall of snow that I would have to break my way through. The top two inches of the water in my water-butts would have frozen solid, and I would smash my way through the ice with a half-brick before filling my water jugs for the day. The jugs would have to be completely immersed or else they would be filled with the detritus that floated on the surface, so I would plunge my arm into the icy water and my hand would instantly turn numb. It would wake me up for the day. Being snowed in was not really a problem for me; by this time I was pretty much self-sufficient, and in my larder I had stored nearly a year’s worth of vegetables and preserved foods.
Hitchhiking up from Abergavenny that winter, I got a lift with an elderly hill farmer with a long white beard that reached almost to his waist. He proudly professed himself a communist, and reminisced for a while about the glory days of the miners’ strike. But before long he turned to matters closer to hand — the struggle to make a living out of rearing sheep on these godforsaken hills. He told me about the winter of ’47, the worst winter in living memory. The snow fell so hard and fast and deep, and stayed so long, he said, that the farmers could not get out to tend to their flocks. And when the thaw finally came, months later, and they could at last reach the high fields, they found their dead sheep tangled in the topmost branches of the trees.
I was snowed in for nearly six weeks that winter. Each day I would dig a path out to my woodpile and chop wood. It was good to keep myself active and, as they say, a log fire warms you twice: once when you chop the logs; and again when you burn them. In a way I exulted in it. In my ramblings I seldom saw anyone at all, not even in the distance, though it could happen, and from time to time it did. But it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either. I was revelling in the experience of isolation and remoteness; more isolation, more remoteness, felt like a good thing. An uninhabited Scottish island, that would be good. The wilderness of northern Canada. Or Siberia, the Siberian taiga, why not? Deeper. Further.
The snow was too deep for me to go far from home, but each time there was a fresh fall of snow overnight I would walk around the fields just beside the cottage to see what the night had brought. If the daytime was for me and the birds, the night-time was for the mammals whose lives I seldom touched. I would have seen them more if I’d had a car and driven around the lanes at night, but seeing an animal pinned in your headlights is not what I call watching. The snow preserved an imprint of all I had missed in the hours of darkness, the wanderings of my local foxes, and more. The classic mammal of mid-Wales is the polecat, a handsome spectacled ferret. This was their heartland, and they were more common here than anywhere, yet I very seldom saw them. Partly, I think they preferred the other side of the river where there was a huge warren of rabbits, their main prey, but mostly it was because they were shy, and active almost entirely at night. Their preferred habitat was reputedly the hinterland where the hill farms met the moor, a precise description of where I lived, in other words, and the first one I ever saw conformed almost perfectly to this stereotype: he was bounding along the top of the very drystone wall that separated the topmost field from the bracken-covered moorland above. He looked back over his shoulder at me, then skipped on, leaped over a stile effortlessly, and was lost to view in the cover of a nearby stand of larches. Yet though seeing one was a special occasion, once I could read the signs I would find their trails everywhere, in snow and in mud.
But if I could not get out to see my birds while I was snowed in, I could still bring the birds to me. On the east side of the cottage was a big old fruit tree with branches that reached almost to the ground. I never knew what kind of fruit tree because it never bore me a single fruit. From January onwards the bullfinches would arrive and almost tenderly nip off every bud, stretching out slowly, sedately even, as they worked their way steadily through the tree’s bounty. I didn’t mind, I could forgive a bullfinch anything, they are such handsome birds with their black hoods and rosy breasts. To be honest, I doubt the tree would have fruited anyway, for beside this tree were the dead remains of a second, and I think it would have needed this second tree for its fruit to germinate. It was on the stump of this dead tree that I put my bird table, just a few feet away from the slotted window in the east wall of my living room.
The birds were incredibly quick to take advantage of this new food supply. Within a day of my first putting out food it had been found by great and blue tits, by robins and chaffinches. Then came the tiny coal tits from the pinewoods. A pair of nuthatches arrived: dapper, long-billed birds like miniature woodpeckers, the only bird that can walk head first down a tree trunk. They would dart on to the nut-feeder, sometimes landing upside down, and send the smaller birds scattering. With their neat black eye-stripes they looked like little highwaymen, and for a short time at least they ruled the roost. Then came the local pair of great-spotted woodpeckers, much bigger birds altogether. At first they didn’t seem to know what to do, they had simply followed the little birds in to see what the fuss was about, and would just pick idly at the rotten log I had left out for them. But eventually they found my offering and made it their own. It was a pleasure to sit at my window and watch them demolishing my nut supply from such close range.