Black-white-black-white: the bull watches the bird through the snow. This is the first flurry for years, long enough to have forgotten how snow changes everything the other side of the doorstep. It began with the supermoon, a silver florin in a halo of limelight. Then came Storm Caroline – “good times never seemed so good,” sang Neil Diamond – and although not such good times elsewhere, it was easy going here.
Weather presenters spread long fingers over maps and warned that the departing storm would pull down Arctic air, leading to snow at low levels. No one warned the dogs, they felt the excitement of a world changed around them, a duty to redraw their scent maps, a camaraderie with humans daft enough to roam abroad in a blizzard.
After the first snowfall overnight, the morning brightened: a veiled sun above winter trees, white fields, and suddenly the familiar had been enchanted. Snowflakes showered from an overhanging hedge sounding like pouring grain; wiper-blade-sized fragments flew from boughs of ash and chestnut in a plantation; a nuthatch knocked out a coded message; a treecreeper wound an invisible ribbon up a cherry tree. On the fencepost, the robin presented a Christmas card of him/herself, pudding plump, breast shot, left eye watching, right eye scanning the electromagnetic map of the wood for sanctuary. Blackbirds were loud with excited-speak.
Up on the top, the wind returned with a vengeance, bone-cold and clean, bringing a sideways lash of snow; and down below, the bull was goaded by it to turn from feeding towards something that caught his eye. A shaggy black Highland bull with a copper ring through his nose, his shoulders rolled and his hooves stamped snow into dark earth. It felt as if, after all this time, the weather and the beast had become one, perfect opponents, the storm in a quiet heart, black and white. Snow blew between the tips of his horns, through the maps of wild bulls and forests. He saw the blackbird at the gate; perhaps like him and the storm, it had come from the north, too.
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