Dot woke up, which was a mistake.

She was a dormouse, and it was December, and a dormouse in December has no business being awake at all. She had gone to bed in October, properly, in the nest she had made at the foot of the hazel, under the leaf litter, with the last of the nuts eaten and her tail round her face, and she had meant to stay there until the primroses. That was the arrangement. That was what dormice did.

But something had changed, and it had changed enough to reach her, all the way down where she was, and she surfaced, slowly, the way you come up through deep water, and lay in the dark with her eyes shut and tried to work out what it was.

It was the quiet.

Not ordinary quiet. The wood was never ordinarily quiet; there was always something, a leaf, a bird, a branch settling. This was a different sort. This was a quiet that had been laid over everything, thick, and pressed down, so that even the sounds that were there were not getting through. She lay and listened to it and was, in a small way, alarmed.

She was also, she found, cold at the nose.

Every part of her said stay. But her nose was cold, and the quiet was strange, and she was awake now, whatever the arrangement said, and so she uncurled, stiffly, and pushed up through the leaves, and put her head out.

The world had gone white.

Snow lay over everything. It lay on the ground, and on the roots of the hazel, and along the top of every twig in a thin high line, and it was still coming down: not fast, not thick, but steadily, out of a sky the colour of the inside of a shell, in flakes that did not seem to fall so much as arrive. There was no wind. Nothing moved. The whole wood stood in it, black and white and holding its breath.

Dot had never seen snow. She had been born in May.

She looked at it for a long time, with her nose out and the rest of her in. A flake landed on her whisker, and was a flake, and then was a drop of water, and then was nothing. She could see, across the white, a line of small marks going away between the trees, four and four and four, where a fox had been through and not stopped. She could see the stream, a black thread in a white field, still going, with a lip of snow on either bank. She could see her own breath.

“You’re up,” said a voice.

It was the robin. He was sitting on the lowest twig of the hazel with his feathers out so that he was very nearly round, and he looked down at her with an eye like a wet seed.

“Something woke me,” said Dot.

“Snow does that,” said the robin. “First time?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said the robin. “Now you’ve seen it.” He shook a little of it off his back. “It’s December, you know. It’ll be like this for weeks. You’ll want to go back down.”

Dot knew that. But she stayed a moment longer, because it seemed a thing you ought to look at properly, once, if you had woken up for it, and she looked. At the white on the black branches. At the fox’s marks going away. At the flakes coming down out of the shell-coloured sky with no hurry in them at all, on the wood, on the stream, on the robin, on her.

Then she went in.

Down through the leaves. Down into the nest, which was dry, and dark, and had kept her warmth for her. She turned round once. She curled. She put her tail over her face, the way it went, and the quiet came down over the top of her, thick and soft and pressed in close, and she thought, as she went, that it was not so strange, that quiet. It was only the sound of everything being covered up, and kept, and left alone till spring.

The snow went on falling. The dormouse slept.