RPDEva 🐕 & RPD Ivy 💣 PD Maisy 💣

It snowed on that field for one night last winter, and in the morning the snow had written down everything that happened in it, and the farmer stood at the gate and read it. Fresh snow on a field is a record nobody meant to keep. Every animal that moved in the dark left where it went, in order, and the farmer, who had spent the night in bed assuming nothing, walked out at seven into four inches of a document. Nelson's tracks were one line. Shelter to the trough and back, done once, at the pace of an animal that had considered the trough from the doorway for some time before committing to it. A donkey hates snow nearly as much as rain, and the line said so. It went straight out, straight back, and did not wander an inch. Hector's tracks were everywhere. He had been round the whole field. A horse does not stand still in snow, he walks it, because standing lets the cold into the feet, and the farmer could see a big loping circuit of the fence line, and a second one inside it, and a third, the prints already softening where he had been round again. A horse pacing out a cold night in a field alone. Except he had not been alone, and the snow said so. Every circuit of the field came back to the shelter. Not past it. To it. The big prints came in along the fence, turned at the corner, and then cut across the open field in a straight line to the shelter doorway, and stopped, and there was a trampled patch in front of the doorway where a horse had stood for a while, and then the prints went out again on the next lap. Four times. Each lap ended at the door. Each time, he had come back to see that the donkey was still in it. And there was one more set. In the trampled patch at the doorway, in among the big prints, were small ones. One line, out of the shelter and into the trampled snow and back again, made some time after the horse had stood there, because they were on top of his. The donkey had come to the door. He had stepped out into the snow he hates, into the place where the horse had stood, and stood there himself for a moment, and gone back in. The farmer could not tell you what for. He has an idea. He has kept it to himself. The thaw came by noon and the whole account went into the ground. Both of them were in the shelter by then, the big one dozing on three legs in the doorway, the small one in his dry corner behind him. Nobody had told the farmer what went on in that field after dark. The snow told him, once, and then took it back.