Andy runs across the ice. Im five years old and he is seven. Strathspeld is everywhere white; the sky is still and shining, hiding the sunin a dazzling, brilliant haze, its light somehow distanced by the intervening layer of high cloud overlooking a chill wilderness of snow. The mountaintops are smotherd,black crags violent splattered marks against that blankness; the hills and forests are blanketed too,the trees are frosted and the loch is hard and soft together, iced over then snowed upon. Here,beyoned the gardens of the lodge and the woods and ornamental ponds,the loch narrows and becomes a river again,bending and funnelling and quicking as it heads towards the rocks and falls and the shallow gorge beyond. Usually from here you can hear the thunder of the falls in the distance but today there is only silence.
I watch Andy run out. I shout after him but I dont follow him. The bank on this side is low,only half a metre above the white plain of the snow-covered river. The grass and reeds around me are flattened under the sudden, overnight fall of snow. On the far side, where Andy is heading, the bank is tall and steep where the water has cut into the hill, removing sand and stomes and leaving an overhang of earth and exposed, dangling tree-roots;the dark gravel space under that ragged overhang is the only place I can see where there is no snow.
Andy is yelling as he runs, coat-tails flapping out behined him, gloved hands outspread, his head thrown back, the ear flaps on his hat snapping and clapping like wings. Hes almost halfway across and suddenly I go from being terrified and annoyed to being exhilarated, intoxicated; overjoyed. We were told not to do |
