Too Cold For Snow

crimes against the person were as nothing to jemmying into an Englishman’s home, being his castle and all that. Those were really punished.
    Luckily the judge in court was a bit more benign. The probation officer saw a villain in the making: the judge saw a seventeen-year-old who had made bad decisions. Kenny’s docket said he was interested in nature, so the judge suggested that he serve a long community sentence ‘somewhere with a bit of nature.’ So they’d found him a job as an assistant warden on Bardsey island, a few miles off the spike of land thrown by north Wales towards Wicklow. The community was a bit sparse there as you might expect, being a storm-tossed isle in a wind-tousled sea.
    He arrived at night as the boatmen were forced to wait for the wind to die down and the tide to turn. The boat powered through a silver lake of water which corralled the moonlight and even gathered light from the stars. Its surface was pixelatedby far off constellations.
    He’d spent the afternoon killing time in a sharp-sided cove on a crash course in island lore. The boatman Wil Rogers knew the waters hereabouts like the back of his hand, which would make them tobacco-coloured with nicotine reefs, judging by the smoke-scale that had built up as far as Wil’s gnarled knuckles. Wil told tales of treasure and pilgrimage and astonishing finds after shipwrecks, including a cargo of rare wines which washed up case after case for a month or more. The lighthouse keepers drank their fill of Chateau La Tour that summer.
    At night the island was a hump of rock set in scintillations of water. The boatman aimed for the calm waters of the Cafn, a harbour dynamited into existence by Trinity House engineers in the Fifties. As Wil’s hands tilled the craft to shore, concentric rings of moonlit water rippled away from the oars.
    The lighthouse was automated and the farmed land was tended by a family who actually lived on the mainland. There was no permanent populace. Centuries of pilgrim visitors had been replaced by holidaymakers who revered the deep quality of silence and by birdwatchers who twitched at the sight of rarities, such as the exceptional marooned migrant, a gray-cheeked thrush which landed after a westerly. It looked like bugger-all to any non-birders, but actually had people chartering helicopters to see it, despite the risky power of October storms. And autumn had those alright, when the sea could change from pewter mirror through churning green to waves like witches’ hats in the time it took for a seal to yawn.
    The warden, Ryan Teale, met them between the small stone ridges of the harbour, bellowing out a hearty welcome as they hoved into land. His foghorn voice resonated on the rocks, unsettling some oystercatchers that were roosting on stands of kelp. Ryan had gone to work on Bardsey straight after completing his diploma in Countryside Management and appreciated the distance it put between him and his head-banging family. His father was a heroin addict and his mother a loose woman. Had there been a remoter posting he’d have taken it, the Isle of Mull or Fair Isle maybe? He’d also left a fevered affair with Mathilde, his lecturer in animal husbandry, a woman with summer-fruit lips, who was married to the principal of the college. To never taste the raspberry flesh again, to bite it hard in the maelstrom of fervid sex was like a prison sentence for him. But her husband had found out, and he was a member of skeet team and so had a gun. Scarpering like a coward was the only option and Ryan took it.
    ‘You’re Kenny, right?’
    ‘I am that.’
    ‘Good to have you here. I think you’ll like it more than prison,’ Which got that subject out of the way.
    As they walked up the only track on the island, referred to fondly as the A1, Kenny heard his first shearwaters. When he’d first read about them he’d thought it was almost worth being branded a career burglar if he could spend time on an island with an enormous colony of shearwaters. They seemed like emblems of wilderness and freedom as they traversed huge oceans on outstretched wings.
    He was staying in Cristin, an old house which might have been home to any one of a dozen Daphne de Maurier heroines. It had windows with driftwood mullions separating the panes of thick glass. Kenny shared a bunk bed with the other assistant called Twm who was out doing some work, even though it was one o’ clock in the morning.
    ‘Don’t expect to get too much sleep