How perfect an image for snow-flakes – like swan feathers drifting gently to the ground. Elsewhere, Williamson again uses feathers as a metaphor, to describe the moon.

‘As Greymuzzle walked on the ice upstream, snow began to fall in flakes like the breast-feathers of swans.’

Source: Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter: His joyful water-life and death in the two rivers, illus. C.F. Tunnicliffe (Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, 1976 (1927)), p. 119

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