Between a green and a white winter in England there is a world of
difference to wild creatures. There may come day upon day, week upon
week, of mist, rain, fog, and blustering winds, of hail, sleet,
and furious snow-blizzards--to birds and beasts these are days of
prosperity and fatness. Peewits, snipe, woodcock, blackbirds, and
thrushes then find food far more plentiful than in the hot dusty days
of late summer. Often, in late summer, their breasts are narrowed by
leanness to the shape of a boat's keel. But in moist, warm winter days
the flesh rises roundly as if it would burst the skin--the breast-bone,
no longer up-standing like a bare ridge, is buried almost out of sight
in a valley of fat, on the thighs are little hillocks of fat, and the
bones of the back cannot be seen or felt for their thick warm covering.
But should there come two or three days of frost, which hold through
the day and increase their grip on the land by night, then this loaded
store of fat vanishes as mist before the sun.
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