The old wooden house was groaning, leaning into the gale wind shrieking insanely round its corners. A shutter had worked lose at the back and was knocking the rhythm to the winds ebbing and flowing. There was no sleep in that racket, and looking out of the window, everything looked pitch black. I decided to go for a walk.

While banshees were playing in the chimney where the wind played hide and seek looking for an open entry into the house that didn’t exist, I put on warm clothes and a heavy jacket. The front door was blown out of my hand as soon as I opened it, and the wind gleefully sent in cold gusts to stir the hallway drapes. I hurried to close the door and stood for a moment in the windy dark, feeling the autumn cold in the air listening to the storm at play. It smelled of rain yet to come, waiting for the wind to end its flashy display.

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I turned my back to the village and followed the dirt track in front of the house upwards towards the wood further up the hill. As I passed the last dark house of the village, the wind got more freedom to move at its will and it started to play with me, trying to push me off the track down towards the valley and its little river. Nothing could be heard over the hustle bustle around me, bushes whipped by gales and a single elm tree bending and groaning as its limbs were shaken by gust upon gust of wind.

Capping the hill, I turned around. The village was all but invisible but for the odd blinking street lantern moving in the storm. The black clouds overhead were driven along by the wind, like frothing waves on the ocean they hurried east towards the Austrian border. In the west, they were eerily illuminated from underneath by the city lights of St. Gall. They seemed even more in a hurry to get out of the light and to assume their threatening colours of blue-black to jet-black.

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I moved down the little incline in front of me to cross the road which had replaced an ancient bridle path through these hills to follow the dirt track on the other side of the road. A dog from a lonely farm house further down the valley barked at my passing, or maybe at the wind. Fighting the wind step by step, I entered under the canopy of the wood covering the mountainside. The air felt warm under the trees and a bit stifling. I could hear the wind rattling the tree tops, but around me the air was unmoved, unmoving, held by the magic of the wood.

Following the path into the darker dark under the trees, I lost the sound of the dog barking. The murmuring silence of the wood surrounded me, broken from time to time by the distant crack of a twig or branch. Proceeding up the hill to where the path split, one going up, one down into the valley, I set off quite a racket myself when setting loose the edge of the path sending stones tumbling down the slope to slap against unseen tree trunks further down.

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Sitting down on the piled up firewood beside the forking path, I listened intently into the night. The wind had reached gale force outside the woods, sending mad screams through the night, shaking the tops of the trees and sending fingers of cold air down to where I sat. I noticed pale eyes staring at me from the bushes on the incline on the opposite side of the path; with a blink they were gone. A whiff of dog told me that it probably had been a curious fox coming to find out whom it was sharing the night with.

Time passed, until total silence hit me with a shock. All murmuring had stopped and nothing seemed to move. Anticipation crackled in the air like electricity. Involuntarily I held my breath with the trees around me. Hushed silence reigned for uncounted seconds until a gentle sigh rustled through the branches as the trees resumed their eternal murmur. I heard the gentle patter of raindrops falling on the roof of leaves above me. The first drop of water hit my face dripping from the trees: It was time to go home.