Brilliant sunshine and a covering of snow had transformed Bleaklow into the Arctic, the sky azure overhead with hints of turquoise on the horizon, bruising to mauve as the day wore on. Approaching Barrow Stones, the moors a glittering sweep of blue-white, nothing stirred but the bitter wind that curled around my neck. The wind had sculpted extravagant shapes from the snow: translucent fins of névé or else, where it eddied, sinuous arcs and twists. Soft spindrift filled the groughs between peat hags fringed with icicles. The same wind, I reflected, has done much the same to Barrow Stones, albeit over millennia rather than days, scouring a crowd of abstract heads nodding in the sun.
The snow had recorded more than the wind’s passage. From time to time we came across a busy intersection of animal tracks, a meandering series of triangles made by grouse, the delicate feet of mice and voles, like sutures, stitching the lightest trace of time through the snow’s surface. There were the unmistakable prints of mountain hares, also known more prettily as blue hares, forepaws offset and hitting the ground behind the back legs. Different animals had shared the same path for a while before looping off individually in a new direction. Then the prints would disappear altogether until we encountered a new group. Mountain hares don’t have extensive ranges.
Coming round the back of a peat hag I found the neat oval of a hare’s form, the snow scraped away to reveal frosty grass beneath, a caramel hole at one end where the hare’s urine had drilled down. I felt a stab of guilt. Mountain hares don’t care to move much on a winter’s day, especially one so cold. They hunker down on these daybeds, escaping the wind and wary of predators, waiting for the hour after dark to feed. Starvation is the great risk of winter. Perhaps I’d driven this one off, although I hadn’t seen it. Emerging from the gully, I looked across to the slope opposite, where the biggest hare I’ve ever seen sat boldly on its arse, broad snout lifted to the sky, breeze ruffling the white hair of its chest: a born survivor.
