The wind is rising, and so is the temperature. The first green patches have re-emerged in my garden, and there are rumours of a thaw after what seems weeks of a china-blue freeze over a white land. So I took my skis out again, back to the hares on the hill, while I still can.
I saw only one or two at first. They sprang up out of hollows; the sound of the wind must have stopped them hearing my approach. In a normal winter, I'm used to spotting them easily, white against dark heather. But this year, seen against snow, I see more clearly why they're called 'blue hares', following with my eyes their smoky, off-white coats as they loped away.
Suddenly, when I got up to about 1500 feet, there were 30 or 40 of them, widely spaced but fleeing in the same trajectory, uphill, away from me . Once they'd gained the relevant distance, they stopped simultaneously, sat, frozen again, offering me a series of triangular profiles like unbreathing sentinels guarding the hillside.
I heard a snippet on In Our Time on Radio 4 this morning, about Boudica, who used a hare in her uprising against the Roman Empire, releasing it from her skirts as a form of divination in battle. Perhaps it was the idea of this mystic run that tempted me out onto the hill again.
One of the delights of being surrounded by white stuff has been observing the criss-crossing patterns of prints made by animal and human movement. I was on a hill near home this afternoon which was scrambling with mountain hares in their white coats. They were locked, as they should be now that it's March, in nose-to-nose combat, leaping and circling. I was mesmerised by the lines left by their journeys; ill-defined holes in deep snow, or fine, clawed paw-prints in the harder stuff. But always that characteristic cadence.
