The hut stood on the shoulder of the hill, where it had been dragged in the spring by the tractor and where it would stay until the lambing was done, and inside it, in the last of the light, Huw was lighting the stove.

The stove was small and black and took a while to get going, and he had a way with it that involved a twist of newspaper and three sticks and a certain amount of patience. The dog watched him from the bunk. Her name was Bess. She was black and white and getting on, and she had watched him light that stove more times than either of them could count, and she still watched, in case tonight was the night he got it wrong.

He did not get it wrong. The paper caught and the sticks caught and he put a bit of coal on and shut the door and opened the vent, and the stove began to tick, and then to roar quietly, and then to be warm.

“There,” he said to Bess.

Bess put her head back down.

Outside, the mist had come up the valley while he was busy and had got everywhere. He opened the half-door and looked out and there was nothing. Not the wall, not the gate, not the shape of the hill going up behind. The nearest ewe, who had been ten yards off and grazing, was now a grey suggestion, and the ones beyond her were not even that. Only the sound of them came through, a tearing of grass and now and then the small dry cough that sheep make for reasons of their own, and, once, from a long way down, a car on the valley road, going slowly, with somebody’s tea waiting.

He shut the door.

There was a jumper on the back of it that lived there, and he put it on. It smelt of the hut, which was to say of coal smoke and dog and old wool, and it was the warmest thing he owned, and it never left the hill.

The hut was eight feet by twelve. It had the bunk along one wall with a mattress on it that had been his father’s and a blanket on that which had been his grandmother’s, and the stove at the end, and a shelf with a lamp and a kettle and a tin with tea in it and another tin with biscuits in it which Bess knew about. It had a small window on each side and a stable door at the end, and a curved tin roof that made a particular sound in rain, and it had, at this moment, the two of them in it and the stove going and nothing else in the world.

He lit the lamp. He filled the kettle from the can and put it on the stove. He sat down on the end of the bunk, by Bess’s feet, and took his boots off, and put his feet up, and the dog, without opening her eyes, moved over the exact amount that was needed and no more.

Lambing was a week off. Maybe less. This was the quiet time before it, when he came up to the hut every night to be near the ewes in case one of them started early, and none of them ever had, and he came up anyway, and would go on coming up, because that was the job, and because, if he was honest, he liked it. The hut. The stove. The dog. The mist, when it came, wrapping the hill up so that the farm below and the road and the rest of the world were simply not there, and would not be there until morning.

The kettle began to think about boiling. It took its time, as kettles do on a stove, and he let it.

He made the tea in the tin mug, strong, and sat with it. Bess looked at the biscuit tin and then at him and then at the tin again, and he took one out and broke it in half and gave her one half and ate the other, and she took hers as she always did, gently, as though it might be the last one and she wanted to remember it.

The mist pressed on the windows. There was nothing to see, and he looked at it anyway.

He thought about the ewes out there in it. A hundred and twelve of them, heavy now, moving slowly, lying down in the lee of the wall in twos and threes with the mist on their backs, chewing, not troubled. They had been on that hill all winter and they had seen mist before. They knew where the wall was. They knew where the hut was, and the light in its window, and that he was in it, and it made no difference to them one way or the other, and that was as it should be.

He drank his tea.

The stove roared quietly. The lamp made its soft hiss. The tin roof ticked as it warmed, and outside a ewe coughed, and another answered, and the grass went on being torn, and beneath it all was the silence that mist makes, which is not the absence of sound but sound with the edges taken off, so that everything comes to you gently and from nowhere in particular.

Bess sighed. She was asleep, or near it. Her feet twitched, once, and he put a hand on her side and she settled.

“Nothing tonight,” he told her. “Nothing tonight, girl.”

He finished the tea and put the mug on the shelf. He turned the lamp down to a glow. He got under the blanket that had been his grandmother’s, with his coat over the top of it and the dog’s weight along his legs, and lay on his back, and looked at the curve of the roof, which he could just see, and listened.

The sheep. The stove. The dog breathing.

He would wake at two, because he always did, and get up and open the door and look out, and there would be mist, or there would be stars, and the ewes would be lying where they had been lying, and he would go back to bed. And he would wake at five, and it would be light, or nearly, and the mist would be lifting off the hill in long slow rags, and the ewes would be up and grazing, and one of them, one of these mornings, would be standing a little apart from the others with something small and wet and new beside her, and the whole thing would begin.

But not tonight.

Tonight was only the hut, and the mist, and the sound of a hundred and twelve sheep being sheep in the dark.

The stove ticked, cooling a little, holding its heat.

Bess breathed in, and out.

The lamp glowed.

And the mist lay on the hill all night, soft and white and going nowhere, with the hut inside it like a lit stone, and the man and the dog asleep, and the sheep all round them, chewing, and waiting, in no hurry at all.