Too Cold For Snow

anywhere – the old farmer had visited an open cast mine, seen the determined ballet of hundred-ton trucks as they climbed the snail’s horn route out of the big hole. Explosives ripped the skin off the earth – the farmed land resembling a Bolivian tin mine. But this was a sound that made industrial explosives dwindle to firecrackers. He imagined the worst.
    He made rude snowshoes by tying wood from old orange boxes onto his boots and walked towards the lip of the land, where the drifts had fallen away into space. He edged his toes forward, a clown on a rope, foolhardy. He was as a child with fire, impossibly magnetised.
    It was all gone – six or seven farms – all the livestock, the hawthorn hedges; the very surface of the land had been swept away, the avalanche having stripped bracken and subsoil, ledge and crevice, road and ffridd with it – leaving a landscape bare as the moon. His heart juddered, as if some animal was trapped in his ribcage. There he was, with his ridiculous shoes on his feet and a lamentation forming on his lips as he mouthed the names of all his neighbours. The light was fading. Half past three on a December day. Pearce shuffled back to the farm, his breath laboured as it strained to take in air. Tomorrow he would go down there.
    His sleep that night was punctuated by vivid dreams. Etched faces from chance meetings, high on the hills. Pryderi with his nonsense and love of foxes, or the dribble of a congregation at Gerazim, when maybe five or six souls would dust off some flakes of melody as they offered up hymns of supplication to a God that only one of them believed in for sure. And that was Pearce, who in the time left to him would ruminate about the why and wherefore of his being spared. He had nights of visitations – the dead coming to chide him and share a story just as they would on mart day: Old Bess with her dust cloth cap and her eyes pinched into sharpness above a ferret face, Howard One-Eye and Mog, the wondrous old fellow who still had a horse as a bedfellow in his stable loft bed and a way with his Welsh words that lit up as extraordinary poetry.
    By morning a veritable procession of the dead had passed through the cold cell of Pearce’s bedroom, a ghastly gang who had elbowed their way into his mind. It was also an inventory, the ones he had to look for in the aftermath.
    Pearce pushed open the door of Blaen-helfa to clamber up onto the snowfield and teeter his way for a few yards. The smooth surface was surprisingly easy to walk on, compacted now by the settling and sculpting action of whipping gales. He felt like a giant, striding across the asthmatic land on platform soles. He skirted the path of the avalanche and headed for the bank of birches where the snow was only a few feet deep, deflected by the trees into the corries underneath. The day was gagged by the cold.
    Pearce got beneath the tree line and walked on, his legs like insect-stalks as he relearned yesterday’s trick of walking on the crystalline surface. He emptied some wizened crab apples from his pocket and set them as bait next to some fishing-line snares.
    It took him over an hour to get to Bess’ farm, feeling the animal pulse inside him again. Only half of the house was still standing, sectioned like one of those dolls’ houses that reveal their interiors. He took off his clumsy snow-shoes, and still went through the front door even though the front wall had collapsed. It was an act of stupid propriety.
    Overnight frost had mummified the room, like sugar dusting the old settle and the cases of stuffed animals. He barked out the woman’s name, willing her to appear but his voice broke against the shell of the house. Bess? Bess!
    Pearce climbed up the staircase, which in places ran alongside the breach in the wall and called out again, but there was nothing. He felt useless, a stupid old man looking for a body. In her bedroom, with its petrified quilt and enormous leather-bound Bible, he sat down, his breath smoking. He remembered how he had hated this woman. A visceral hatred.
    Her father, who everyone called Mistar, had been Pearce’s childhood joy – a man who would sit him down on the settle next to the fire and tell him outrageous stories – some true, some fanciful. Pearce loved nothing more than looking deep into the flames, to where the blue gas crept over the coal to ignite percussively and set off fanciful wonders. The old man’s voice could quieten to a murmur when he told his