Earlier this afternoon, out of a blue sky, grey clouds began to collect and a wind rose over the mountains. The children and I stood out on the deck, wrapped in blankets, listening to the oak trees squeaking in arthritic protest as their branches were bent this way and that, then, just as suddenly, the wind dropped, there was absolute quiet and snow began falling silently and relentlessly, coating the landscape in the thinnest layer of white.

‘Look.’ Emmy lifted her finger and pointed. There it was, in the gathering darkness, padding across our eye line, pausing only briefly to stop and stare at us.

‘What is it?’ she whispered.

‘I don’t know.’ I squinted out into the gloom. ‘A coyote, maybe?’

Certainly, it was our first real wild animal. Road-runners yes, chipmunks yes, deer, any number of them, soundlessly crossing the mountain road in their ones and twos, hindquarters bobbing as they leaped from track to bush, and even funny little prairie dogs with velvety newborn-looking skin, but I’d yet to see a coyote in the flesh and imagined them brownish, hunchback, of the same mangy, insolent mould as the hyena. This creature, however, was huge with grey, almost silver-streaked fur.

‘A wolf!’ Jack breathed.

‘Wolves walk in every dream,’ or so said Rudyard Kipling, but when I rubbed my eyes it had vanished.

Now the whining outside the door turns to a yip and then to an urgent-sounding bark.

‘Mummy!’ Jack digs his elbow into my ribs, but no way am I opening this door. There are mountain lions out here and only last week I’d read a story in the Ague newsletter about a grizzly bear up in Idaho who had lumbered onto the deck of some local’s house. This homeowner, presumably out of relief that the grizzly was outside while he was safely in, did a little na na ne na na victory jig right in front of it, whereupon the grizzly smashed his way through the glass door and ate him right up, an Act Three I found hilarious at the time, but less funny now that the scratching and barking persists.

‘Vinny, Vinny!’ Emmy takes up the call. ‘Mummy, let him in. Don’t be so mean.’

‘Open the door,’ Jack shouts. He renews his efforts to claw free.

Emmy’s eyes well up with tears, and her bottom lip quivers pitifully. ‘Let him in, Mummy, I beg you to death, he’ll catch cold . . . he’ll catch cold and then he’ll die, DIE ... do you hear?’

I look at my children, so shaky and miserable. Now that the novelty of the first few weeks has worn off, things have not been going well just recently. There’s no question that both children are missing home and who’s to say my dream of freedom and romantic isolation won’t turn into their nightmare of lonely imprisonment?