A Raven in Snow.

Our house is an island in the mud. Our plank drawbridge to the lane falls short.

And then, at last, it snows.

We wake to a white and would-be silent world, were it not for the wind ghosting eerily through the house in its unsettling northiness. We rush out to feed the animals.

A cock pheasant takes off, coughing up its alarm and flies straight into the barn roof, mistaking its snowy slope for the white sky (as I have mistaken its evening silhouette for the down, before). The pheasant hops onto the apex, shakes itself of embarrassment and snow and flies on, leaving an imprint of angel wings.

We walk down the foamy hedgerow, pushing a surf of small, twittering birds ahead of us: linnet, chaffinch, yellowhammer and goldfinch. The wind has blown snow through bitter holes left in the hedge by a savage hedgecutter and there are drifts. White-rumped bullfinches flit in warm cherry-damson and navy pairs and a flock of fieldfare and redwing come alive in the snow, in slate-grey, chestnut, black and white relief, the latter with the radiated hug of dying embers under their wings, as if they are carrying coals or, as if a thermal imaging camera is revealing the heat from a small, hot, beating heart, flooding against a snowy breast of feathers.

What occurred in the wild, cold early hours is printed across these snowy white pages. The entrances to rat holes are thawed and those that are occupied, steam gently. Vole holes pock the banks. Fox tracks lie as neat, parallel seams, until they wobble, interweave and meet with a scuffle of snow in a foxy love-match. The snow has part-thawed and refrozen under sleety rain and we sledge down the Park pale, bailing out before hitting the barely frozen pool of melt water.

And then we make the hill. The great curves, ditches and edges of the hillfort are smoothed and dramatized with deep snow and blue light. The snow creaks underfoot. The vale of uninterrupted meadow anthills bobble the landscape and, where the hoarfrost tops them, it furs the surface like a stole: the crystals like Yeti fur, like the pelt of an arctic fox. The snowfield glitters and we hold our breath with the spell of it.

The north wind has blown Gallows Down to green, but on the leeward side are great shelves of snow. The track is churned white. Just a thin layer of turf and soil separate the whiteness of snow from the whiteness of an old-ocean’s depth of chalk beneath.

From a tree below at Flying Leap, a raven apprehends us with loud, astonishing, un–birdlike calls. The wood stops to listen. There are guttural clucks and growls, a repeated ‘cloop, cloop, cloop’ like stones dropping down a well and a frog like ‘quark, quark’. Is he calling out co-ordinates, summoning a court, or delivering the weather report? He finishes on a metallic note; a hammer ringing off some ghostly forge. He bounces down the trees’ scales, showering snow, wings folded behind his back, head down, pacing a branch like a thoughtful speaker, broadcasting the news.

A squally wind whisks the trees into a short blizzard and the bird ends its oration chiming with the bells of St Michaels and All Angels in the village below.

In the gathering dusk, and wanting the light and warmth of the woodburner, we give in to the hill and slide down on our bottoms, graceless and giggling.