Too Cold For Snow

will try to besmirch his name. Not that he thought of that when it came to Rwanda, or blowing up the Rainbow Warrior, or dealing arms to Iran, or running wiretaps or keeping his fig-pecker in his pants.
    ‘When cool, begin to chew. It should take about fifteen minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and on to the inner organs.’
    Tonight this is the loneliest table in the world, even though there are guests aplenty and an animated chatter resounding throughout the dining room. But at the head of the table is the President, marooned on a glacier of self pity.
    He can taste the bird’s entire life as he chews in the clouded light: the sibilant wheat fields in the shadows of the Atlas mountains, the salt ‘n’ seaweed tang of the Mediterranean air, the warm draughts of lavender and pear scent blown by a mistral over Provence and on to the Loire. The pulpy lips and time-stained teeth crunch down with a guillotine certainty toward the pea-sized lungs and heart, thoroughly saturated with liqueur. The tiny organs burst with a sherbet fizz. Quiet, the President is masticating! Listen to the crunch of bird bone. Listen to his loneliness.
    Tomorrow is his last night as tour guide of the lost republic and tomorrow he will taste nightingale. Fabien has been given this special request. His men, slinky hunters, assured of success, are already deep in the green woods. They will bring him one, trussed in a net. With this much notice they were lucky to get one.
    Fabien, brilliant in his kitchen habitat, will know what to do. He remembers his grandmother and her macabre lullabies:
    ‘Lark’s tongue in aspic, thrush in a pie, all the birds that ever sang, sing better as they die…’
    The songbird’s last serenade will be as short as a gasp. In the kitchen, a man will strop his knife on the whetstone. It will glint, as if alive. He will enjoin his sous chef to start a suitable sauce, let it simmer overnight. Let the flavours meld and intensify.
    Wild eyed on a twig, the songbird cannot so much as blow a thin note, such is its fear. The hunters’ boots crackle like fire through the dry understory. They are pacing out what remains of her terrified life. She knew they were coming, with all of her heart.

White Out
     
     
    It was the time when an avalanche tore through Rhydycu and Arllen-Fawr, scattering winter hares before it, their fleeing muscles turning missiles, thrown snowballs of terror. They raced to escape the white waves that came pounding down behind them. It went razing Golfa and Ysgwennant, tearing down the walls of farms – Cyrchynan and Bedwan, Cwrt Hir and Tan-y-Ffridd as if they were made of papier maché. It licked cleanly over the land with a Serbian ferocity, gathering impetus from the banks of wind-packed snow ledges behind the sheep folds. Tearing apart Y Gloig, Merllwyn Gwyn and Pentre Llawen with all the certainty of daisy cutter bombs.
    What had been snug homes, with dogs at the hearth and Aga, roosters fluffing up feathers in outhouses and babies gurgling, now lay as a fractured syntax of slates and dislocated stones at the valley bottom.
     
    It would take months to tally the death toll as emergency services were stretched to capacity. The Berwyn avalanche was only one incident among thousands. Towns and cities were denied water as reservoirs turned into plate ice and roads were buried under drifts a couple of storeys deep. Some families suffocated in picture postcard settings.
    It was a winter beyond imagination.
    Pearce lived above the avalanche line. His house stood in the lee of five Scots pines which broke the wind into skeetering channels of air. He had been gathering up the last sheep he could find – maybe a third of the seven hundred odd he had taken up from the hafod only three months before. He fashioned makeshift pens by running lengths of plastic fence between two rocky outcrops. He almost had to mine his way towards them to get them out from the snow and into the gulley where they could be fed cake. He was a sapper again, using trenching tools to excavate his way towards his Passchendaele brethren. The resigned animals waited, freezing. As Pearce burrowed in towards a paralysed ewe, he heard a fantastic cracking sound as the weight of snow half a mile away broke loose from the stratum that cocooned so much of the high hills. It sounded like an overture to apocalypse.
    On one of his rare visits to the south – on one of his rare visits