Shortly after dawn in mid-February a drystone wall is still standing, beaten half to death by the jab and hook of the wind. The snow, packed in tight to each of a thousand crevices, keeps it upright for now. I hunker in the lee, half blinded by the back-slash air, and marvel. In my cupped hands is the incomparable whiteness, the impossible lightness of a sleeping barn owl. Surely she sleeps. How can these colours that no artist would dare, this beauty past a poet’s saying, be unable to sustain life? I have so much to learn, so many adjustments to make in this bitter bruiser of a morning. The bird stays still and lifeless. She remains so very beautiful.
How did she die? She died of winter. In a fearsome Atlantic storm after days of portent and threat. She had known the signs fine well. The storm came, the storm into which she could not go - but neither could she stay, already in hock to the cold and the lack. Winter had come for the rent.
Yes, summer also slays, and autumn slaughters. (We will not speak here of the treachery of spring, the snowdrop deceiver.) See the robin in May, breathing a longed-for sigh of relief as the sun at last warms his back. His momentary lapse of vigilance is rewarded by the sparrowhawk’s attention to detail. Follow the harvest mouse in September, dilly-dallying over a potential mate’s piss, its ultraviolet signature also seen by the talons of the wind hovering above. But such sudden deaths are only unfinished tunes. The robin and the harvest mouse enter into hawk and falcon. The song begins again, and once more again, until the whole melody is sung flawlessly.
Winter is no minstrel. It lays its plans more thoroughly than summer. It is more patient than autumn.
At the end of last year, winter seemed reluctant to begin the race, dawdling in mildness as the last leaves fell. The barn owl I am cradling was already far out ahead, pressing on towards the brindled days of April’s sanctuary. Surely the lumbering bulk of winter could never gain on her head start.
Autumn had been kind to her. The shelter of the hayloft, unused these three decades, had not been challenged, neither by owls nor by renovation. A few mice moved into the ground floor beneath her roost. She let them be for as long as she could, a store for windy evenings and the mornings of covering snow. Her feathers, she felt, lacked some spark but would suffice. Only her stomach gave her pause. Some chemical taint had entered into her during the past summer. There was sometimes a sickly smell to her pellets, a smell of goodness remaining, undigested. Winter, nosing around the barn while she slept, had smelt this too. It was duly factored into the calculations.
Through December winter kept its head down, covering the miles, making up ground. In January she heard it muttering in the helm wind.* Not so far behind now. As she sensed the February storm approaching, her empty stomach purred and wheedled. Still time to fly out and hunt. There’s still time.
On the wing in gathering gusts, a great white butterfly in failing light, she stoops at salvation. And misses. Winter has been watching from behind the ridge. The tree-tops blow their battle trumpets as the gust-front crosses the valley. The flanks are covered by the charging dapple-greys of the blizzard.
She stays down briefly, mantling the empty ground, the gale upon her. In a drystone wall she recognises a fallen hollow where the waller’s careful plans have been undone by years of frost. She has perched there once before. Barely out of the nest, she had gawped at the big mossy world and hoped for her parents to bring her food. As the snow dances around her she stands there again, wraps the fraying old coat of her wings around herself and begins to wait, in hope and in gratitude for the sunsets which have fed her and the dawns which have warmed her. Dear gods of the fells and the rivers, don’t let the paths to such grace become hidden from us.
*The helm wind, like its better-known cousins the levanter, the mistral and the sirocco, is a named wind. It blows from the north-east into Cumbria. As it tumbles off Cross Fell and Mallerstang Edge it produces, given the right atmospheric conditions, a zone of turbulence which growls and grumbles as if a sleeping giant is troubled by bad dreams.
Absolutely beautiful
Poignant and beautifully written tribute. Thank you for sharing your writing.