That night the snow fell heavy, the wind chasing it into every crack and cranny in the house. Edith waited in the dark for the dawn, for the light of a lantern. And knew before daybreak that the blacksmith wasn’t coming. The blizzard made the journey impossible. She went to bed, curled into herself and wept. Nature had locked and bolted the door. There would be no escape for her.

She woke to find the world quiet, the light different; she got up and pulled back the shutters. The village lay buried in drifts of snow that brought with it an unearthly hush. It looked to Edith as if a new world was being fashioned, the old one buried.

‘Edith!’ Misha called from the verandah. ‘I need your help.’ He came into the kitchen. ‘Should the pig be in here?’

Edith nodded.

‘Listen, there isn’t much time. The mountain is talking. It’s cracking. I told the blacksmith and he too hears strange sounds. I think it’s a sign there’ll be an avalanche.’

Edith listened and didn’t wait. She put on her grandmother’s boots, her coat and shawl and, with Misha’s help, shoved the pig into her father’s room.

‘Only once, well before I was born, did such a catastrophe come near our village,’ said Misha as they trudged through the deep snow, the wind blowing it one way then the other. ‘The worst of it happened to the east. There were no houses there then but now the house of the miller’s son is there. I went this morning to tell him it would be best if he and Lena left and went somewhere safer. He threw me out, told me I was an idiot. I don’t know what to do. I thought if you went… I know you can’t talk but…’ He stopped. ‘I’m worried about Lena.’

Edith set off towards the house of the miller’s son and Misha was about to follow when she shook her head. He said something that she didn’t catch in the whirling wind and after a few steps she looked back and Misha was gone.

The further she went, the more the houses disappeared into the snow. By the time she saw Lena’s house, her black skirt was white and her feet and hands freezing. Now she could no longer hear the mountain, only the miller’s son shouting. Edith banged on the front door and waited. The miller’s son stopped shouting and she banged again and again until at last he opened it. Uninvited, Edith went into the house.

‘What do you want?’ said the miller’s son. ‘It’s no one else’s business what goes on between man and wife.’

Lena was holding her face, sobbing, but the moment she saw Edith she fetched her shawl.