The bothy at Inshriach sits alone in a clearing, with a view through the trees across the Spey to the Monadhliath mountains. When I arrive, all this is under a foot of snow: juniper hunched over with the weight of it, silver birch cryptic against its white backdrop, the whole glade swathed in mist. The sunlit uplands to the north are glossy and white like Italian meringue, dolloped on with a spoon.
I get the stove going and settle down to work, but my eye is drawn through the window to the unfolding spectacle of the winter sky. Pallid shades play out across the heavens: grey, rose, water-blue, lilac. The snow a paper pressed against the painted sky. When I emerge for firewood the only movement is the blue of the woodsmoke, drifting soundlessly over the roof. I think: I am entirely alone.
Two days pass like this. My only company is the endless drama in the sky and a single crow, for whom the shifting mists draw apart like veils. By Tuesday, however, the snow is in retreat. It slumps, wet and heavy, on the doorstep. I fetch water from the river and cross the traces of many others recorded in the slush: delicate bird prints, the slim-ankled trot of a fox, and another – flat feet, short and broad, long in the claw. A warlike creature. A badger.
His path is easy to trace: he follows an old logging track, then splits off towards the trees. The prints wind between pillowy contours in the heather for 10 metres before disappearing into a tunnel of snow and from there into a sett. We’ve been cohabiting all this time. I just wasn’t looking hard enough.
I retreat to my own cosy room – the fire burning low – and think of Nan Shepard, who wrote of tracks like these: “One is companioned, though not in time.” They are a reassurance. Outside, the landscape is transforming too slowly to see, but quick enough that each time I look up from my book it is changed. The balance of light and dark shifts, the mountains leopard-spotted with snow.
