雪中猎人

Bruegel painted this in 1565, one of a set showing the turning year, and this panel is deep winter, December into January. Three hunters trudge home up a hill with their dogs, and you can read the outing in their backs. It went badly. They have a single small fox to show for it, the pack behind them looks beaten, and the snow is that flat grey-white of a hard overcast day. Down in the valley the whole village is out on the frozen ponds, tiny black figures skating and playing games on the ice. Those winters were real. Bruegel worked during a stretch of especially bitter European winters, and the frozen waterways and bare black trees here are the weather he actually knew. Look for the bird trap on the ice at the lower right, a slanted board propped on a stick, waiting.