A Fox in the Snow

A skyful of heavy clouds breathed a thick, white hush of snow over Belfast towards dawn this morning, and it weighed down the branches of the trees in the forest behind my house. Today's new, white morning is almost silent; my neighbours stay at home, and those who venture out drive slowly, tentatively, each following in the tracks of the car that went before, leaving the snow complete on either side of their furrows.

I stay at home, warm but agitated, robbed of my freedom to go where I want, when I want. I imagine the warmth of the cafe I had intended sitting in to read a bit more Kurt Vonnegut. I imagine it empty of its usual fair-weather crowd on a day like today, coffee brewing, and Michael waiting behind the bar for customers who don’t arrive. The snow and the silence would be sure to highlight his mocha-coloured melancholy; maybe they would enhance it.

Michael's imagined melancholy infects me from a distance and I wander around the house from room to room feeding a perversely enjoyable resentment at my forced incarceration. My wife is away for a few days, my children still in bed, assured of a day off because of the snow. From my bedroom window I look out on the bowed branches and the freshly emptied periwinkle blue sky. No birds fly, and even the longest stalks of uncut grass and last summer's forgotten dahlias fail to stretch up through the thick snow to breathe in the morning and the orange rays of sun that cut sharply through the tracery of strangely sculpted twigs and boughs that have long since been stripped of every remembrance of greenery.

I watch nature devastate itself with another layer of cruel nature; a sweet sense of desolation wells up within me as I survey the wasteland, and just before my sudden sadness tips me into despondency a startled fox rushes from the bushes and runs across the lawn. It stops beside the apple tree and stands belly deep in snow, sniffing the air, nervous in the open space but also confused. He’s a big fox, the archetypal fox with pricked ears listening and nose twitching. His tail is big and bushy and he’s wearing the thickest, rustiest looking winter coat I’ve ever seen.

Suddenly a branch snaps under the weight of snow. The crack of the wood echoes around the garden, and the falling branch sends a powder of snow into the air when it falls to the ground, frightening the fox who scurries through the hedge and he’s away. He leaves nothing behind but a disturbance in the snow and a melancholic mixture of wonder and grace.