A crisp, sunny day, with a dusting of fresh snow on the ground. It’s all bound to be replaced by gray skies and slush soon, I’m sure, so I hurried out.

Literally hurried: we had originally made entirely different plans for today, but Ingrid was feeling quite unwell, so this was a last minute idea, leaving me no time to pack or plan. Järvafältet nature reserve is my go-to place for a quick outing, and that’s where I ended up today as well.

There used to be a bird-watchers’ platform very close Säby gård, but it was torn down years ago. Too costly to repair, maybe. Now the only thing left of it is an odd dead-end stump of a path that goes very near the lake but stops just before, with a marshy wooded area in the way of a proper lake view.

With the ground all frozen firm, I skirted the trees and got all the way to the lake shore. The lake was under a thick layer of ice, and there were tracks going into the distance. Someone had also hacked into the ice in one place and the gouge was a good 7 cm deep, with no sign of getting through. Solid enough for me, so off I went on the ice.

I followed the tracks of two humans with a dog. A little bit away there were tracks of one skater and one skier. And here and there, going off in totally different directions: a hare, a fox, a deer, some unknown small creature. The deer went straight across. The dog followed the tracks of the unknown creature for a little bit, before getting called back.

I swung back along the other side of the long lake. Now there were two humans but no dog. The skater and skier were closer to the middle of the lake.

The circuit around the lake didn’t take me very long, maybe an hour and a half. Had I been walking on an ordinary path, I’d maybe have looked at the clock and decided to continue in some other direction. But this circuit felt so perfectly complete in and of itself that following it with something else would have been wrong, so that was that.