Lynx

Waking up to -15 degrees, the winter still holds Halland in the firmest of grips. Just outside the house: tracks in the fresh snow of what looks like the Eurasian lynx – a secretive nightfarer with thick fur beneath its paws, making the prints appear large and slightly blurred at the edges.

With the morning light, the lynx itself is nowhere to be seen, and yet entirely present – an encounter through absence that becomes impossible not to follow. A quiet assertion of sovereignty in a landscape otherwise claimed by dog walkers and Strava segments.

In forty days, I will trade this crystalline Halland morning for the open expanses of the deserts, where the possibility is its North American counterpart, the cougar. Long before that, rain will have turned the snow into slush. But for a brief winter morning, Halland belonged to something wild.