Too Cold For Snow

already thinking about how best to frighten them away. He had seen off people before and some were running still. He wasn’t scared to use his gun.
    The travellers’ vehicles were state-of-the-art clapped-out . Exhausts sounded like mortar rounds in south Lebanon. Some of the stragglers, such as an old school bus from wartime Maidstone, made emphysemic sounds as they went through the gears.
    Tryfan was a man who smelled of old teabags and septic tanks; an utter stranger to soap and washing. He had been decidedly unhygienic ever since his mother – herself as unwashed as the Atacama desert – had warned him about the dangers of cleanliness. In a toad croak she would proclaim that it was only people with black hearts who washed, and that the Devil eats black hearts on toast, with a pint pot of ale to wash it down.
    A shadow passed over Tryfan’s heart as he remembered her advice after, what, forty years? Forty years since mam had been lowered into ground so wintery-hard five men had had to pickaxe open a grave for her over the course of two whole days. Even then it was so shallow they had to cover it in rocks to thwart badgers. Mam fach, what would she think of these charabancs and men with hair like women who were setting up camp within two hundred yards of the house? On the hill, the sacred hill! She wouldn’t like it. She wouldn’t like it one bit and he could hear her now, in a whisper that came out from under the rocks and slithered over to reach him: ‘Get rid of them, Tryfan, and do it soon. These vermin have no right to be on land your great-grandfather bought with all he had. They don’t belong here. This is where we work and this is where we’re buried.’
    That night the visitors played flutes, ate homemade bread and told each other stories. After the children were finally asleep the adults drank cider and laughed about their misfortunes on the road: how they had been refused service at one garage by a man with rampaging B.O. who called them bloody yuppies and how Maggs had tried to wind down the window of his van to make a hand signal and the whole door had fallen off as they headed west on the M4!
    That night Tryfan couldn’t sleep because of the sound of drums, a nocturnal samba played by a recovering crack head called Trevor, coupled with the peals of laughter coming from a Volkswagen camper full of people drinking magic mushroom soup, with extra mushrooms. In the van, decorated with all the fruit known to man and a couple of species more, their hilarity was matched by the strength and persistence of the visions they each had: swimming with talking seals in the bladderwrack surrounding holy Iona, daybreak rainbows and enchanted children playing a gamelan of tiny tinnabulations, cardboard cut-out mountains receding into the for-never-ness of somewhere too far away and a city where nonsense was the only logic so cars ran on cheese. Boy, those mushrooms from the edge of Cadair Idris were good – real brainmashers and neuro-scramblers. Magic, truly!
    In fitful sleep Tryfan hatched his plan. In the morning, well before even the early rising cockerel had opened his eyes and before the dew had lifted from the burdock leaves, he was down in the sheep byre taking a carborundum to a scythe. When he lopped the head off one of the strangers’ dogs they would feel no pain, but would run around silently.
    Tanrallt farm was at the very base of the ‘mountain’ and by one of those accidents of geography was actually at sea level. If you took a step inside the farmhouse you’d see what any self-respecting nineteenth century novelist would call a hovel, with its soot-layered walls’ lack of any decoration. There was a pair of jugs from Delft, most probably a gift from the squire to Tryfan’s mother. Squire, indeed! Tryfan himself was born out of wedlock – plentyn llwyn a pherth – a child born in either copse or hedge. The owner of the big house’s carnal appetites were well known, and his fearful whip was known for miles.
    As Tryfan set out with murderous purpose, his scythe crooked under his arm, he spotted a heron fighting with an eel it had caught in the pond. The bird gulped and tried to find purchase on the wriggling fish with its serrated bill and eventually managed to manoeuvre it down its throat, where it continued to struggle in the bird’s crop even after the bird took flight.
    When he followed the line of ash trees he heard a beautiful voice singing out and he saw the girl, Rachel,