I know you can feel snug, back there on the sheltered side of the mountain, where the sun shines through the wind and the days seem quiet and drowsy. But winter rides the mountain ponies like a fleet ghost, and it screams up the crags off the slopes.
You will never feel the awe that builds up in a body as the mist seeps past in the shadowy pre-dawn, and exposes, some distance away, an animal as large as a two-storey house.. The more you look at it, the bigger it grows, with its sagging back and and misty shagginess . . . and all the while you keep pedalling fast, to get away from the thing that stands silent, like a monstrous yak.
When you come to the trees, they are all splayed to the mountain, driven there by the sweeping thrust of the peak-hopping wind; they are bare of leaves, and the rooks hobble ungainly among the straggling twigs.
If you listened hard, you on the far side of the mountain, you might hear the sound of roaring singing, or, as the cold night falls and the bubbling clouds crowd round the highest slopes, the staccato calling of a tousled lad, rounding up the cows, driving them down the stony mud road to their hot sweet sheds to be milked.