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fires, hunched and hungry. Across all the fields and down the holloway I hear only one rusty
chip
of a solitary great tit. It is late afternoon under a high lead and gold sky and everywhere is bleak and empty, the temperature is the sort that robs your lungs of breath. Tundra air. Frost sparkles the spiders’ webs between stems of dead cow parsley. Weather forecasters predict –10 tonight and the trees seem anxious. In the deepest part of the wood their trunks are starting to crawl with frost and they reach for each other with long, trembling branches. They know what’s coming. Hardest hit are the insect-eating birds. The usual morsel-filled cracks and holes in bark are swollen hard with ice and yet it is a leaf- and seed-eater, a woodpigeon, I find dead on its back beneath a pylon. Ice has already softened the grey of its feathers into white and its face is a blur, like old fruit sagging with mould. I only notice it at all because of its two comically curled, pink feet, frozen stiff and sticking up in the air as though struck down in bed mid-prayer to the steel giant above. What I first mistake for a rook taking flight turns out to be a shredded black bin bag caught in the pylon’s struts, tirelessly lifting and settling. I watch it for a while flapping in the wind until the cold becomes too much. In the backyard, cutting firewood for the stove, the axe tings uselessly off logs as though they are steel.
    Later, once warmed up by toast and tea, I’m up a ladder painting a ceiling. The radio smacks about the bare walls, rebounding off windows still unsoftened by curtains. There is an interview with an art critic talking about how paintings supply the mind with an important ‘fix’. Perhaps, but the edge-land provides a mental and physical transcendence greater than I’ve felt in any gallery. Merely the thought of it changes me.
    I am drifting around the viaduct, frozen-breathed, following fox tracks. He must have been running: there are two prints, one in front of the other, then a gap and then two more. They lead down a gully to a scratched hole under a piece of corrugated steel, the sort my brother and I used to hollow out and commandeer in war games as kids. Fox holes. I lift the steel cautiously, then crouch inside. I’m aware that loneliness and the starkness of January are sending me ever inwards, into my mind and my memories. There is something about the stripping away of nature’s decoration at this time of year that induces this kind of self-reflection. There is a trade, however; the earth exposes its inner-self too. Different perspectives are revealed each time I search for him. Buried things. New dimensions. One pre-dawn I sit and yawn and wait, close to the mouth of the holloway, down-wind, by an oak, under an intense tangle of branch, pylon and cable. It is the silent window between night and day, that slow shift in state. Liquid air.
Freezing
. The dark shrinks and disappears into the silhouettes forming in the west. My consciousness widens, rising with the night air, broadening with the dawn. Eastwards the sun, weak and rheumy as an old man’s eye, hauls itself above the black trees firing the frost-fields into molten gold. The morning assumes a fragile blue hue, almost crackable, as transparent, triangular clouds freeze across the sky. Patterns appear on the surface too: the soft-focus haze of hedges blurring north and the corduroy shadows of tractor-combed earth. The edge-land is confessional, hiding nothing from me, revealing that which lies unwritten in books and libraries, unknown in the minds of those still asleep in bed. Those that have never seen this.
    I watch the monotony of our constrained time unravel. The trees of the wood change colour with the rising light and trick my eye. Breaking out from the river gorge, their brown froth spills over the rolling curves of field and consumes the town. The spot where I am, the highest point in the fields, is suddenly an