When Maggie saw through the window that a snowman had appeared in her garden she put on wellies and strode out to face it, fist clenched against an impulse to punch its head off.

She prowled the garden, searching for clues in the blanket of snow that stretched the land even flatter on this bleak March day. From the trails, she could see that the intruders had rolled snow across the garden from her front gate. But she found no footsteps. She walked to the gateway and peered down the silenced lane, rutted with a single pair of tyre tracks. A newcomer still teetering on the edges of her own territory, she had no idea why anyone would sneak up on her like this.

She crept back inside and stood at one of three large windows in the sitting room, looking north to Dunnet Bay. She'd arrived two weeks ago to this place that seemed to scratch at her. Raw winds streamed past the windows carrying grains of ice or sand or both. The newspapers told of trucks lifted from harbour-sides by winter storms and smashed against walls. There was no shelter in the low-lying fields. Cattle, fenced in by flagstones processing like linear graveyards, hoisted their rumps into north-easterlies and sunk their heads. The strange abrasiveness had put her at ease; it suited her. It wasn't an unfriendly place. No one passed her on the street without a greeting, but none of them had imposed further.

She glanced at the snowman. For what was supposed to be an empty place, there was now a sense that there could be people watching her.

From the window she looked through a lattice of bare branches outlining chinks of colour beyond. The effect was like leaded stained glass. She could just make out the jagged rise and fall of the dunes and beyond them a snippet of sea darkened by the nearby snow; the surf a yellowy-pink. No one lived between her and the sea. There was just a cluster of derelict farm buildings and birds that crashed their wings about in the gaunt trees; rooks' nests perched in the dark filigree of topmost twigs.

She left the window, made coffee, and retreated to her study to settle to work. The phone jangled and she leapt to her feet.

'How is it?' she heard when she picked up the phone.

'Good grief, Richard,' she said, her breath ragged. 'Isn't it two months before you have to start harassing me about the atlas deadline?'

During the fortnight in which she'd been freelance and Richard had become her commissioning editor, he seemed to respond to her emails with phone calls, despite their habit of emailing when they'd been colleagues working at adjacent desks.

'I meant life in wolf territory,' he said.

She knew he was referring to Timothy Pont, an early mapmaker they both admired who'd been Minister of Dunnet Church, not far from her new home. In the late 16 century Pont had drawn sketch maps of the whole of Scotland which informed the earliest map of the country in Joan Blaeu's monumental world atlas. Pont's maps of the north coast showed vast white spaces into which only the capillary ends of rivers dared to penetrate; where no people seemed to be. 'Extreem wildernes' he had written across the white, and 'verie great plenty of wolves doo haunt in this desert places'. Even now the road atlas didn't make it look so different and had seemed to summon her here. To the white spaces on the map.

'I'm surrounded by snow,' she said.

'Yikes.'

'Don't worry, there are daffodils coming up through it. Wolf territory is perfect,' she said, trying not to think about the snowman.

'Really?'