1 files changed, 4869 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/6111.txt b/6111.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f0c1fc9
--- /dev/null
+++ b/6111.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4869 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Over Prairie Trails, by Frederick Philip Grove
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Over Prairie Trails
+
+Author: Frederick Philip Grove
+
+Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6111]
+Posting Date: June 13, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Gardner Buchanan
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS
+
+By Frederick Philip Grove
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+     Introductory
+     1  Farms and Roads
+     2  Fog
+     3  Dawn and Diamonds
+     4  Snow
+     5  Wind and Waves
+     6  A Call for Speed
+     7  Skies and Scares
+
+
+
+
+Introductory
+
+A few years ago it so happened that my work--teaching school--kept me
+during the week in a small country town in the centre of one of the
+prairie provinces while my family--wife and little daughter--lived in
+the southern fringe of the great northern timber expanse, not very far
+from the western shore of a great lake. My wife--like the plucky little
+woman she is--in order to round off my far-from-imperial income had made
+up her mind to look after a rural school that boasted of something like
+a residence. I procured a buggy and horse and went "home" on Fridays,
+after school was over, to return to my town on Sunday evening--covering
+thus, while the season was clement and allowed straight cross-country
+driving, coming and going, a distance of sixty-eight miles. Beginning
+with the second week of January this distance was raised to ninety miles
+because, as my more patient readers will see, the straight cross-country
+roads became impassable through snow.
+
+These drives, the fastest of which was made in somewhat over four
+hours and the longest of which took me nearly eleven--the rest of them
+averaging pretty well up between the two extremes--soon became what made
+my life worth living. I am naturally an outdoor creature--I have lived
+for several years "on the tramp"--I love Nature more than Man--I take to
+horses--horses take to me--so how could it have been otherwise? Add
+to this that for various reasons my work just then was not of the most
+pleasant kind--I disliked the town, the town disliked me, the school
+board was sluggish and unprogressive, there was friction in the
+staff--and who can wonder that on Fridays, at four o'clock, a real
+holiday started for me: two days ahead with wife and child, and going
+and coming--the drive.
+
+I made thirty-six of these trips: seventy-two drives in all. I think
+I could still rehearse every smallest incident of every single one
+of them. With all their weirdness, with all their sometimes dangerous
+adventure--most of them were made at night, and with hardly ever any
+regard being paid to the weather or to the state of the roads--they
+stand out in the vast array of memorable trifles that constitute the
+story of my life as among the most memorable ones. Seven drives seem,
+as it were, lifted above the mass of others as worthy to be described
+in some detail--as not too trivial to detain for an hour or so a patient
+reader's kind attention. Not that the others lack in interest for
+myself; but there is little in them of that mildly dramatic, stirring
+quality which might perhaps make their recital deserving of being heard
+beyond my own frugal fireside. Strange to say, only one of the seven
+is a return trip. I am afraid that the prospect of going back to rather
+uncongenial work must have dulled my senses. Or maybe, since I was
+returning over the same road after an interval of only two days, I had
+exhausted on the way north whatever there was of noticeable impressions
+to be garnered. Or again, since I was coming from "home," from the
+company of those for whom I lived and breathed, it might just be that
+all my thoughts flew back with such an intensity that there was no
+vitality left for the perception of the things immediately around me.
+
+
+
+
+ONE. Farms and Roads
+
+At ten minutes past four, of an evening late in September, I sat in the
+buggy and swung out of the livery stable that boarded my horse. Peter,
+the horse, was a chunky bay, not too large, nor too small; and I had
+stumbled on to him through none of my sagacity. To tell the plain truth,
+I wanted to get home, I had to have a horse that could stand the trip,
+no other likely looking horse was offered, this one was--on a trial
+drive he looked as if he might do, and so I bought him--no, not quite--I
+arranged with the owner that I should make one complete trip with
+him and pay a fee of five dollars in case I did not keep him. As the
+sequence showed, I could not have found a better horse for the work in
+hand.
+
+I turned on to the road leading north, crossed the bridge, and was
+between the fields. I looked at my watch and began to time myself. The
+moon was new and stood high in the western sky; the sun was sinking on
+the downward stretch. It was a pleasant, warm fall day, and it promised
+an evening such as I had wished for on my first drive out. Not a cloud
+showed anywhere. I did not urge the horse; he made the first mile in
+seven, and a half minutes, and I counted that good enough.
+
+Then came the turn to the west; this new road was a correction line, and
+I had to follow it for half a mile. There was no farmhouse on this short
+bend. Then north for five miles. The road was as level as a table top--a
+good, smooth, hard-beaten, age-mellowed prairie-grade. The land to east
+and west was also level; binders were going and whirring their harvest
+song. Nobody could have felt more contented than I did. There were two
+clusters of buildings--substantial buildings--set far back from the
+road, one east, the other one west, both clusters huddled homelike
+and sheltered in bluffs of planted cottonwoods, straight rows of them,
+three, four trees deep. My horse kept trotting leisurely along, the
+wheels kept turning, a meadow lark called in a desultory way from a
+nearby fence post. I was "on the go." I had torn up my roots, as it
+were, I felt detached and free; and if both these prosperous looking
+farms had been my property--I believe, that moment a "Thank-you" would
+have bought them from me if parting from them had been the price of the
+liberty to proceed. But, of course, neither one of them ever could have
+been my property, for neither by temperament nor by profession had I
+ever been given to the accumulation of the wealth of this world.
+
+A mile or so farther on there stood another group of farm
+buildings--this one close to the road. An unpainted barn, a long and
+low, rather ramshackle structure with sagging slidedoors that could no
+longer be closed, stood in the rear of the farm yard. The dwelling
+in front of it was a tall, boxlike two-story house, well painted in a
+rather loud green with white door and window frames. The door in front,
+one window beside it, two windows above, geometrically correct, and
+stiff and cold. The house was the only green thing around, however.
+Not a tree, not a shrub, not even a kitchen garden that I could see.
+I looked the place over critically, while I drove by. Somehow I was
+convinced that a bachelor owned it--a man who made this house--which
+was much too large for him--his "bunk." There it stood, slick and cold,
+unhospitable as ever a house was. A house has its physiognomy as well
+as a man, for him who can read it; and this one, notwithstanding its new
+and shining paint, was sullen, morose, and nearly vicious and spiteful.
+I turned away. I should not have cared to work for its owner.
+
+Peter was trotting along. I do not know why on this first trip he never
+showed the one of his two most prominent traits--his laziness. As I
+found out later on, so long as I drove him single (he changed entirely
+in this respect when he had a mate), he would have preferred to be
+hitched behind, with me between the shafts pulling buggy and him. That
+was his weakness, but in it there also lay his strength. As soon as I
+started to dream or to be absorbed in the things around, he was sure
+to fall into the slowest of walks. When then he heard the swish of
+the whip, he would start with the worst of consciences, gallop away at
+breakneck speed, and slow down only when he was sure the whip was safe
+in its socket. When we met a team and pulled out on the side of the
+road, he would take it for granted that I desired to make conversation.
+He stopped instantly, drew one hindleg up, stood on three legs, and
+drooped his head as if he had come from the ends of the world. Oh yes,
+he knew how to spare himself. But on the other hand, when it came to a
+tight place, where only an extraordinary effort would do, I had never
+driven a horse on which I could more confidently rely. What any horse
+could do, he did.
+
+About two miles beyond I came again to a cluster of buildings, close to
+the corner of the crossroads, sheltered, homelike, inviting in a large
+natural bluff of tall, dark-green poplars. Those first two houses had
+had an aristocratic aloofness--I should not have liked to turn in
+there for shelter or for help. But this was prosperous, open-handed,
+well-to-do middle class; not that conspicuous "moneyedness" that we so
+often find in our new west when people have made their success; but the
+solid, friendly, everyday liberality that for generations has not had to
+pinch itself and therefore has mellowed down to taking the necessities
+and a certain amount of give and take for granted. I was glad when on
+closer approach I noticed a school embedded in the shady green of the
+corner. I thought with pleasure of children being so close to people
+with whom I should freely have exchanged a friendly greeting and
+considered it a privilege. In my mental vision I saw beeches and elms
+and walnut trees around a squire's place in the old country.
+
+The road began to be lined with thickets of shrubs here: choke cherry
+bushes, with some ripe, dried-up black berries left on the branches,
+with iron-black bark, and with wiry stems, in the background; in
+front of them, closer to the driveway, hawthorn, rich with red fruit;
+rosebushes with scarlet leaves reaching down to nearly underfoot. It
+is one of the most pleasing characteristics of our native thickets
+that they never rise abruptly Always they shade off through cushionlike
+copses of smaller growth into the level ground around.
+
+The sun was sinking. I knew a mile or less further north I should have
+to turn west in order to avoid rough roads straight ahead. That meant
+doubling up, because some fifteen miles or so north I should have to
+turn east again, my goal being east of my starting place. These fifteen
+or sixteen miles of the northward road I did not know; so I was anxious
+to make them while I could see. I looked at the moon--I could count on
+some light from her for an hour or so after sundown. But although I knew
+the last ten or twelve miles of my drive fairly well, I was also aware
+of the fact that there were in it tricky spots--forkings of mere trails
+in muskeg bush--where leaving the beaten log-track might mean as much
+as being lost. So I looked at my watch again and shook the lines over
+Peter's back. The first six miles had taken me nearly fifty minutes.
+I looked at the sun again, rather anxiously I could count on him for
+another hour and a quarter--well and good then!
+
+There was the turn. Just north of it, far back from both roads, another
+farmyard. Behind it--to the north, stretched out, a long windbreak of
+poplars, with a gap or a vista in its centre. Barn and outbuildings
+were unpainted, the house white; a not unpleasing group, but something
+slovenly about it. I saw with my mind's eye numerous children, rather
+neglected, uncared for, an overworked, sickly woman, a man who was bossy
+and harsh.
+
+The road angles here. Bell's farm consists of three quartersections; the
+southwest quarter lends its diagonal for the trail. I had hardly
+made the turn, however, when a car came to meet me. It stopped. The
+school-inspector of the district looked out. I drew in and returned his
+greeting, half annoyed at being thus delayed. But his very next word
+made me sit up. He had that morning inspected my wife's school and seen
+her and my little girl; they were both as well as they could be. I felt
+so glad that I got out of my buggy to hand him my pouch of tobacco, the
+which he took readily enough. He praised my wife's work, as no doubt
+he had reason to do, and I should have given him a friendly slap on the
+shoulder, had not just then my horse taken it into his head to walk away
+without me.
+
+I believe I was whistling when I got back to the buggy seat. I know I
+slapped the horse's rump with my lines and sang out, "Get up, Peter, we
+still have a matter of nearly thirty miles to make."
+
+The road becomes pretty much a mere trail here, a rut-track, smooth
+enough in the rut, where the wheels ran, but rough for the horse's feet
+in between.
+
+To the left I found the first untilled land. It stretched far away to
+the west, overgrown with shrub-willow, wolf-willow and symphoricarpus--a
+combination that is hard to break with the plow. I am fond of the silver
+grey, leathery foliage of the wolf-willow which is so characteristic of
+our native woods. Cinquefoil, too, the shrubby variety, I saw in great
+numbers--another one of our native dwarf shrubs which, though decried as
+a weed, should figure as a border plant in my millionaire's park.
+
+And as if to make my enjoyment of the evening's drive supreme, I saw
+the first flocks of my favourite bird, the goldfinch. All over this vast
+expanse, which many would have called a waste, there were strings
+of them, chasing each other in their wavy flight, twittering on the
+downward stretch, darting in among the bushes, turning with incredible
+swiftness and sureness of wing the shortest of curves about a branch,
+and undulating away again to where they came from.
+
+To the east I had, while pondering over the beautiful wilderness,
+passed a fine bluff of stately poplars that stood like green gold in
+the evening sun. They sheltered apparently, though at a considerable
+distance, another farmhouse; for a road led along their southern edge,
+lined with telephone posts. A large flock of sheep was grazing between
+the bluff and the trail, the most appropriate kind of stock for this
+particular landscape.
+
+While looking back at them, I noticed a curious trifle. The fence along
+my road had good cedar posts, placed about fifteen feet apart. But at
+one point there were two posts where one would have done. The wire, in
+fact, was not fastened at all to the supernumerary one, and yet this
+useless post was strongly braced by two stout, slanting poles. A mere
+nothing, which I mention only because it was destined to be an important
+landmark for me on future drives.
+
+We drove on. At the next mile-corner all signs of human habitation
+ceased. I had now on both sides that same virgin ground which I have
+described above. Only here it was interspersed with occasional thickets
+of young aspen-boles. It was somewhere in this wilderness that I saw a
+wolf, a common prairie-wolf with whom I became quite familiar later on.
+I made it my custom during the following weeks, on my return trips, to
+start at a given point a few miles north of here eating the lunch which
+my wife used to put up for me: sandwiches with crisply fried bacon for a
+filling. And when I saw that wolf for the second time, I threw a little
+piece of bacon overboard. He seemed interested in the performance and
+stood and watched me in an averted kind of way from a distance. I have
+often noticed that you can never see a wolf from the front, unless it
+so happens that he does not see you. If he is aware of your presence, he
+will instantly swing around, even though he may stop and watch you. If
+he watches, he does so with his head turned back. That is one of the
+many precautions the wily fellow has learned, very likely through
+generations of bitter experience. After a while I threw out a second
+piece, and he started to trot alongside, still half turned away; he
+kept at a distance of about two hundred yards to the west running in a
+furtive, half guilty-looking way, with his tail down and his eye on me.
+After that he became my regular companion, an expected feature of my
+return trips, running with me every time for a while and coming a little
+bit closer till about the middle of November he disappeared, never to be
+seen again. This time I saw him in the underbrush, about a hundred yards
+ahead and as many more to the west. I took him by surprise, as he took
+me. I was sorry I had not seen him a few seconds sooner. For, when I
+focused my eyes on him, he stood in a curious attitude: as if he was
+righting himself after having slipped on his hindfeet in running a sharp
+curve. At the same moment a rabbit shot across that part of my field
+of vision to the east which I saw in a blurred way only, from the very
+utmost corner of my right eye. I did not turn but kept my eyes glued to
+the wolf. Nor can I tell whether I had stirred the rabbit up, or whether
+the wolf had been chasing or stalking it. I should have liked to know,
+for I have never seen a wolf stalking a rabbit, though I have often seen
+him stalk fowl. Had he pulled up when he saw me? As I said, I cannot
+tell, for now he was standing in the characteristic wolf-way, half
+turned, head bent back, tail stretched out nearly horizontally. The tail
+sank, the whole beast seemed to shrink, and suddenly he slunk away with
+amazing agility. Poor fellow--he did not know that many a time I had fed
+some of his brothers in cruel winters. But he came to know me, as I
+knew him; for whenever he left me on later drives, very close to Bell's
+corner, after I had finished my lunch, he would start right back on my
+trail, nose low, and I have no doubt that he picked up the bits of bacon
+which I had dropped as tidbits for him.
+
+I drove and drove. The sun neared the horizon now It was about six
+o'clock. The poplar thickets on both sides of the road began to be
+larger. In front the trail led towards a gate in a long, long line of
+towering cottonwoods. What was beyond?
+
+It proved to be a gate indeed. Beyond the cottonwoods there ran an
+eastward grade lined on the north side by a ditch which I had to cross
+on a culvert. It will henceforth be known as the "twelve-mile bridge."
+Beyond the culvert the road which I followed had likewise been worked up
+into a grade. I did not like it, for it was new and rough. But less did
+I like the habitation at the end of its short, one-mile career. It stood
+to the right, close to the road, and was a veritable hovel. [Footnote:
+It might be well to state expressly here that, whatever has been said
+in these pages concerning farms and their inhabitants, has intentionally
+been so arranged as not to apply to the exact localities at which they
+are described. Anybody at all familiar with the district through which
+these drives were made will readily identify every natural landmark. But
+although I have not consciously introduced any changes in the landscape
+as God made it, I have in fairness to the settlers entirely redrawn the
+superimposed man-made landscape.] It was built of logs, but it looked
+more like a dugout, for stable as well as dwelling were covered by way
+of a roof with blower-thrown straw In the door of the hovel there stood
+two brats--poor things!
+
+The road was a trail again for a mile or two. It led once more through
+the underbrush-wilderness interspersed with poplar bluffs. Then
+it became by degrees a real "high-class" Southern Prairie grade. I
+wondered, but not for long. Tall cottonwood bluffs, unmistakably planted
+trees, betrayed more farms. There were three of them, and, strange to
+say, here on the very fringe of civilization I found that "moneyed"
+type--a house, so new and up-to-date, that it verily seemed to turn up
+its nose to the traveller. I am sure it had a bathroom without a
+bathtub and various similar modern inconveniences. The barn was of the
+Agricultural-College type--it may be good, scientific, and all that, but
+it seems to crush everything else around out of existence; and it surely
+is not picturesque--unless it has wings and silos to relieve its rigid
+contours. Here it had not.
+
+The other two farms to which I presently came--buildings set back from
+the road, but not so far as to give them the air of aloofness--had again
+that friendly, old-country expression that I have already mentioned:
+here it was somewhat marred, though, by an over-rigidity of the lines.
+It is unfortunate that our farmers, when they plant at all, will nearly
+always plant in straight lines. The straight line is a flaw where we try
+to blend the work of our hands with Nature. They also as a rule neglect
+shrubs that would help to furnish a foreground for their trees; and,
+worst of all, they are given to importing, instead of utilising our
+native forest growth. Not often have I seen, for instance, our high-bush
+cranberry planted, although it certainly is one of the most beautiful
+shrubs to grow in copses.
+
+These two farms proved to be pretty much the last sign of comfort that I
+was to meet on my drives to the north. Though later I learned the names
+of their owners and even made their acquaintance, for me they remained
+the "halfway farms," for, after I had passed them, at the very next
+corner, I was seventeen miles from my starting point, seventeen miles
+from "home."
+
+Beyond, stretches of the real wilderness began, the pioneer country,
+where farms, except along occasional highroads, were still three,
+four miles apart, where the breaking on few homesteads had reached the
+thirty-acre mark, and where a real, "honest-to-goodness" cash dollar
+bill was often as scarce as a well-to-do teacher in the prairie country.
+
+The sun went down, a ball of molten gold--two hours from "town," as I
+called it. It was past six o'clock. There were no rosy-fingered clouds;
+just a paling of the blue into white; then a greying of the western
+sky; and lastly the blue again, only this time dark. A friendly crescent
+still showed trail and landmarks after even the dusk had died away. Four
+miles, or a little more, and I should be in familiar land again. Four
+miles, that I longed to make, before the last light failed...
+
+The road angled to the northeast. I was by no means very sure of it. I
+knew which general direction to hold, but trails that often became mere
+cattle-paths crossed and criss-crossed repeatedly. It was too dark by
+this time to see very far. I did not know the smaller landmarks. But I
+knew, if I drove my horse pretty briskly, I must within little more than
+half an hour strike a black wall of the densest primeval forest fringing
+a creek--and, skirting this creek, I must find an old, weather-beaten
+lumber bridge. When I had crossed that bridge, I should know the
+landmarks again.
+
+Underbrush everywhere, mostly symphoricarpus, I thought. Large trunks
+loomed up, charred with forest fires; here and there a round, white
+or light-grey stone, ghostly in the waning light, knee-high, I should
+judge. Once I passed the skeleton of a stable--the remnant of the
+buildings put up by a pioneer settler who had to give in after having
+wasted effort and substance and worn his knuckles to the bones. The
+wilderness uses human material up...
+
+A breeze from the north sprang up, and it turned strangely chilly I
+started to talk to Peter, the loneliness seemed so oppressive. I told
+him that he should have a walk, a real walk, as soon as we had crossed
+the creek. I told him we were on the homeward half--that I had a bag of
+oats in the box, and that my wife would have a pail of water ready...
+And Peter trotted along.
+
+Something loomed up in front. Dark and sinister it looked. Still there
+was enough light to recognize even that which I did not know. A large
+bluff of poplars rustled, the wind soughing through the stems with a
+wailing note. The brush grew higher to the right. I suddenly noticed
+that I was driving along a broken-down fence between the brush and
+myself. The brush became a grove of boles which next seemed to shoot
+up to the full height of the bluff. Then, unexpectedly, startlingly,
+a vista opened. Between the silent grove to the south and the large;
+whispering, wailing bluff to the north there stood in a little clearing
+a snow white log house, uncannily white in the paling moonlight. I
+could still distinctly see that its upper windows were nailed shut with
+boards--and yes, its lower ones, too. And yet, the moment I passed it,
+I saw through one unclosed window on the northside light. Unreasonably I
+shuddered.
+
+This house, too, became a much-looked-for landmark to me on my future
+drives. I learned that it stood on the range line and called it the
+"White Range Line House." There hangs a story by this house. Maybe I
+shall one day tell it...
+
+Beyond the great and awe-inspiring poplar-bluff the trail took a sharp
+turn eastward. From the southwest another rut-road joined it at the
+bend. I could only just make it out in the dark, for even moonlight was
+fading fast now. The sudden, reverberating tramp of the horse's feet
+betrayed that I was crossing a culvert. I had been absorbed in getting
+my bearings, and so it came as a surprise. It had not been mentioned in
+the elaborate directions which I had received with regard to the road to
+follow. For a moment, therefore, I thought I must be on the wrong trail.
+But just then the dim view, which had been obstructed by copses and
+thickets, cleared ahead in the last glimmer of the moon, and I made
+out the back cliff of forest darkly looming in the north--that forest I
+knew. Behind a narrow ribbon of bush the ground sloped down to the bed
+of the creek--a creek that filled in spring and became a torrent, but
+now was sluggish and slow where it ran at all. In places it consisted of
+nothing but a line of muddy pools strung along the bottom
+of its bed. In summer these were a favourite haunting place for
+mosquito-and-fly-plagued cows. There the great beasts would lie down in
+the mud and placidly cool their punctured skins. A few miles southwest
+the creek petered out entirely in a bed of shaly gravel bordering on the
+Big Marsh which I had skirted in my drive and a corner of which I was
+crossing just now.
+
+The road was better here and spoke of more traffic. It was used to haul
+cordwood in late winter and early spring to a town some ten or fifteen
+miles to the southwest. So I felt sure again I was not lost but would
+presently emerge on familiar territory. The horse seemed to know it,
+too, for he raised his head and went at a better gait.
+
+A few minutes passed. There was hardly a sound from my vehicle. The
+buggy was rubber-tired, and the horse selected a smooth ribbon of grass
+to run on. But from the black forest wall there came the soughing of the
+wind and the nocturnal rustle of things unknown. And suddenly there came
+from close at hand a startling sound: a clarion call that tore the
+veil lying over my mental vision: the sharp, repeated whistle of the
+whip-poor-will. And with my mind's eye I saw the dusky bird: shooting
+slantways upward in its low flight which ends in a nearly perpendicular
+slide down to within ten or twelve feet from the ground, the bird being
+closely followed by a second one pursuing. In reality I did not see the
+birds, but I heard the fast whir of their wings.
+
+Another bird I saw but did not hear. It was a small owl. The owl's
+flight is too silent, its wing is down-padded. You may hear its
+beautiful call, but you will not hear its flight, even though it circle
+right around your head in the dusk. This owl crossed my path not more
+than an inch or two in front. It nearly grazed my forehead, so that I
+blinked. Oh, how I felt reassured! I believe, tears welled in my eyes.
+When I come to the home of frog and toad, of gartersnake and owl and
+whip-poor-will, a great tenderness takes possession of me, and I should
+like to shield and help them all and tell them not to be afraid of me;
+but I rather think they know it anyway.
+
+The road swung north, and then east again; we skirted the woods; we came
+to the bridge; it turned straight north; the horse fell into a walk. I
+felt that henceforth I could rely on my sense of orientation to find
+the road. It was pitch dark in the bush--the thin slice of the moon
+had reached the horizon and followed the sun; no light struck into the
+hollow which I had to thread after turning to the southeast for a while.
+But as if to reassure me once more and still further of the absolute
+friendliness of all creation for myself--at this very moment I saw high
+overhead, on a dead branch of poplar, a snow white owl, a large one,
+eighteen inches tall, sitting there in state, lord as he is of the realm
+of night...
+
+Peter walked--though I did not see the road, the horse could not mistake
+it. It lay at the bottom of a chasm of trees and bushes. I drew my cloak
+somewhat closer around and settled back. This cordwood trail took us on
+for half a mile, and then we came to a grade leading east. The grade
+was rough; it was the first one of a network of grades which were being
+built by the province, not primarily for the roads they afforded, but
+for the sake of the ditches of a bold and much needed drainage-system.
+To this very day these yellow grades of the pioneer country along the
+lake lie like naked scars on Nature's body: ugly raw, as if the bowels
+were torn out of a beautiful bird and left to dry and rot on its
+plumage. Age will mellow them down into harmony.
+
+Peter had walked for nearly half an hour. The ditch was north of the
+grade. I had passed, without seeing it, a newly cut-out road to the
+north which led to a lonesome schoolhouse in the bush. As always when
+I passed or thought of it, I had wondered where through this
+wilderness-tangle of bush and brush the children came from to fill
+it--walking through winter-snows, through summer-muds, for two,
+three, four miles or more to get their meagre share of the accumulated
+knowledge of the world. And the teacher! Was it the money? Could it
+be when there were plenty of schools in the thickly settled districts
+waiting for them? I knew of one who had come to this very school in a
+car and turned right back when she saw that she was expected to live as
+a boarder on a comfortless homestead and walk quite a distance and
+teach mostly foreign-born children. It had been the money with her!
+Unfortunately it is not the woman--nor the man either, for that
+matter--who drives around in a car, that will buckle down and do this
+nation's work! I also knew there were others like myself who think this
+backwoods bushland God's own earth and second only to Paradise--but few!
+And these young girls that quake at their loneliness and yet go for a
+pittance and fill a mission! But was not my wife of their very number?
+
+I started up. Peter was walking along. But here, somewhere, there led a
+trail off the grade, down through the ditch, and to the northeast into
+the bush which swallows it up and closes behind it. This trail needs
+to be looked for even in daytime, and I was to find it at night! But by
+this time starlight began to aid. Vega stood nearly straight overhead,
+and Deneb and Altair, the great autumnal triangle in our skies. The
+Bear, too, stood out boldly, and Cassiopeia opposite.
+
+I drew in and got out of the buggy; and walking up to the horse's head,
+got ahold of the bridle and led him, meanwhile scrutinizing the ground
+over which I stepped. At that I came near missing the trail. It was just
+a darkening of the ground, a suggestion of black on the brown of the
+grade, at the point where poles and logs had been pulled across with the
+logging chain. I sprang down into the ditch and climbed up beyond and
+felt with my foot for the dent worn into the edge of the slope, to make
+sure that I was where I should be. It was right, so I led the horse
+across. At once he stood on three legs again, left hindleg drawn up, and
+rested.
+
+"Well, Peter," I said, "I suppose I have made it easy enough for you:
+We have another twelve miles to make. You'll have to get up." But Peter
+this time did not stir till I touched him a flick with my whip.
+
+The trail winds around, for it is a logging trail, leading up to the
+best bluffs, which are ruthlessly cut down by the fuel-hunters. Only
+dead and half decayed trees are spared. But still young boles spring up
+in astonishing numbers. Aspen and Balm predominate, though there is some
+ash and oak left here and there, with a conifer as the rarest treat for
+the lover of trees. It is a pitiful thing to see a Nation's heritage
+go into the discard. In France or in England it would be tended as
+something infinitely precious. The face of our country as yet shows the
+youth of infancy, but we make it prematurely old. The settler who should
+regard the trees as his greatest pride, to be cut into as sparingly as
+is compatible with the exigencies of his struggle for life--he regards
+them as a nuisance to be burned down by setting wholesale fires to them.
+Already there is a scarcity of fuel-wood in these parts.
+
+Where the fires as yet have not penetrated too badly, the cutting, which
+leaves only what is worthless, determines the impression the forest
+makes. At night this impression is distinctly uncanny. Like gigantic
+brooms, with their handles stuck into the ground, the dead wood stands
+up; the underbrush crowds against it, so dense that it lies like huge
+black cushions under the stars. The inner recesses form an almost
+impenetrable mass of young boles of shivering aspen and scented balm.
+This mass slopes down to thickets of alder, red dogwood, haw, highbush
+cranberry, and honeysuckle, with wide beds of goldenrod or purple asters
+shading off into the spangled meadows wherever the copses open up into
+grassy glades.
+
+Through this bush, and skirting its meadows, I drove for an hour. There
+was another fork in the trail, and again I had to get out and walk on
+the side, to feel with my foot for the rut where it branched to the
+north. And then, after a while, the landscape opened up, the brush
+receded. At last I became conscious of a succession of posts to the
+right, and a few minutes later I emerged on the second east-west grade.
+Another mile to the east along this grade, and I should come to the
+last, homeward stretch.
+
+Again I began to talk to the horse. "Only five miles now, Peter, and
+then the night's rest. A good drink, a good feed of oats and wild hay,
+and the birds will waken you in the morning."
+
+The northern lights leaped into the sky just as I turned from this
+east-west grade, north again, across a high bridge, to the last road
+that led home. To the right I saw a friendly light, and a dog's barking
+voice rang over from the still, distant farmstead. I knew the place. An
+American settler with a French sounding name had squatted down there a
+few years ago.
+
+The road I followed was, properly speaking, not a road at all, though
+used for one. A deep master ditch had been cut from ten or twelve miles
+north of here; it angled, for engineering reasons, so that I was going
+northwest again. The ground removed from the ditch had been dumped along
+its east side, and though it formed only a narrow, high, and steep dam,
+rough with stones and overgrown with weeds, it was used by whoever had
+to go north or south here. The next east-west grade which I was aiming
+to reach, four miles north, was the second correction line that I had
+to use, twenty-four miles distant from the first; and only a few hundred
+yards from its corner I should be at home!
+
+At home! All my thoughts were bent on getting home now. Five or six
+hours of driving will make the strongest back tired, I am told. Mine is
+not of the strongest. This road lifted me above the things that I liked
+to watch. Invariably, on all these drives, I was to lose interest here
+unless the stars were particularly bright and brilliant. This night I
+watched the lights, it is true: how they streamed across the sky, like
+driving rain that is blown into wavy streaks by impetuous wind. And they
+leaped and receded, and leaped and receded again. But while I watched, I
+stretched my limbs and was bent on speed. There were a few particularly
+bad spots in the road, where I could not do anything but walk the
+horse. So, where the going was fair, I urged him to redoubled effort. I
+remember how I reflected that the horse as yet did not know we were so
+near home, this being his first trip out; and I also remember, that
+my wife afterwards told me that she had heard me a long while before I
+came--had heard me talking to the horse, urging him on and encouraging
+him.
+
+Now I came to a slight bend in the road. Only half a mile! And sure
+enough: there was the signal put out for me. A lamp in one of the
+windows of the school--placed so that after I turned in on the yard, I
+could not see it--it might have blinded my eye, and the going is rough
+there with stumps and stones. I could not see the cottage, it stood
+behind the school. But the school I saw clearly outlined against the
+dark blue, star-spangled sky, for it stands on a high gravel ridge. And
+in the most friendly and welcoming way it looked with its single eye
+across at the nocturnal guest.
+
+I could not see the cottage, but I knew that my little girl lay sleeping
+in her cosy bed, and that a young woman was sitting there in the dark,
+her face glued to the windowpane, to be ready with a lantern which
+burned in the kitchen whenever I might pull up between school and house.
+And there, no doubt, she had been sitting for a long while already; and
+there she was destined to sit during the winter that came, on
+Friday nights--full often for many and many an hour--full often till
+midnight--and sometimes longer...
+
+
+
+
+TWO. Fog
+
+Peter took me north, alone, on six successive trips. We had rain, we had
+snow, we had mud, and hard-frozen ground. It took us four, it took us
+six, it took us on one occasion--after a heavy October snowfall--nearly
+eleven hours to make the trip. That last adventure decided me. It was
+unavoidable that I should buy a second horse. The roads were getting
+too heavy for single driving over such a distance. This time I wanted a
+horse that I could sell in the spring to a farmer for any kind of work
+on the land. I looked around for a while. Then I found Dan. He was a
+sorrel, with some Clyde blood in him. He looked a veritable skate of a
+horse. You could lay your fingers between his ribs, and he played out
+on the first trip I ever made with this newly-assembled, strange-looking
+team. But when I look back at that winter, I cannot but say that again
+I chose well. After I had fed him up, he did the work in a thoroughly
+satisfactory manner, and he learnt to know the road far better than
+Peter. Several times I should have been lost without his unerring road
+sense. In the spring I sold him for exactly what I had paid; the farmer
+who bought him has him to this very day [Footnote: Spring, 1919.] and
+says he never had a better horse.
+
+I also had found that on moonless nights it was indispensable for me to
+have lights along. Now maybe the reader has already noticed that I am
+rather a thorough-going person. For a week I worked every day after four
+at my buggy and finally had a blacksmith put on the finishing touches.
+What I rigged up, was as follows: On the front springs I fastened with
+clamps two upright iron supports; between them with thumbscrews the
+searchlight of a wrecked steam tractor which I got for a "Thank-you"
+from a junk-pile. Into the buggy box I laid a borrowed acetylene
+gas tank, strapped down with two bands of galvanized tin. I made the
+connection by a stout rubber tube, "guaranteed not to harden in the
+severest weather." To the side of the box I attached a short piece of
+bandiron, bent at an angle, so that a bicycle lamp could be slipped over
+it. Against the case that I should need a handlight, I carried besides
+a so-called dashboard coal-oil lantern with me. With all lamps going, it
+must have been a strange outfit to look at from a distance in the dark.
+
+I travelled by this time in fur coat and cap, and I carried a robe for
+myself and blankets for the horses, for I now fed them on the road soon
+after crossing the creek.
+
+Now on the second Friday of November there had been a smell of smoke in
+the air from the early morning. The marsh up north was afire--as it had
+been off and on for a matter of twenty-odd years. The fire consumes
+on the surface everything that will burn; the ground cools down, a new
+vegetation springs up, and nobody would suspect--as there is nothing to
+indicate--that only a few feet below the heat lingers, ready to leap up
+again if given the opportunity In this case I was told that a man had
+started to dig a well on a newly filed claim, and that suddenly he found
+himself wrapped about in smoke and flames. I cannot vouch for the truth
+of this, but I can vouch for the fact that the smoke of the fire was
+smelt for forty miles north and that in the afternoon a combination
+of this smoke (probably furnishing "condensation nuclei") and of the
+moisture in the air, somewhere along or above the lake brought about
+the densest fog I had ever seen on the prairies. How it spread, I shall
+discuss later on. To give an idea of its density I will mention right
+here that on the well travelled road between two important towns a man
+abandoned his car during the early part of the night because he lost his
+nerve when his lights could no longer penetrate the fog sufficiently to
+reach the road.
+
+I was warned at noon. "You surely do not intend to go out to-night?"
+remarked a lawyer-acquaintance to me at the dinner table in the hotel;
+for by telephone from lake-points reports of the fog had already reached
+the town. "I intend to leave word at the stable right now," I replied,
+"to have team and buggy in front of the school at four o'clock." "Well,"
+said the lawyer in getting up, "I would not; you'll run into fog."
+
+And into fog I did run. At this time of the year I had at best only a
+little over an hour's start in my race against darkness. I always drove
+my horses hard now while daylight lasted; I demanded from them their
+very best strength at the start. Then, till we reached the last clear
+road over the dam, I spared them as much as I could. I had met up with a
+few things in the dark by now, and I had learned, if a difficulty arose,
+how much easier it is to cope with it even in failing twilight than by
+the gleam of lantern or headlight; for the latter never illumine more
+than a limited spot.
+
+So I had turned Bell's corner by the time I hit the fog. I saw it in
+front and to the right. It drew a slanting line across the road. There
+it stood like a wall. Not a breath seemed to be stirring. The fog,
+from a distance, appeared to rise like a cliff, quite smoothly, and it
+blotted out the world beyond. When I approached it, I saw that its face
+was not so smooth as it had appeared from half a mile back; nor was it
+motionless. In fact, it was rolling south and west like a wave of great
+viscosity. Though my senses failed to perceive the slightest breath of a
+breeze, the fog was brewing and whirling, and huge spheres seemed to be
+forming in it, and to roll forward, slowly, and sometimes to recede, as
+if they had encountered an obstacle and rebounded clumsily. I had seen
+a tidal wave, fifty or more feet high, sweep up the "bore" of a river
+at the head of the Bay of Fundy. I was reminded of the sight; but here
+everything seemed to proceed in a strangely, weirdly leisurely
+way. There was none of that rush, of that hurry about this fog that
+characterizes water. Besides there seemed to be no end to the wave
+above; it reached up as far as your eye could see--now bulging in, now
+out, but always advancing. It was not so slow however, as for the moment
+I judged it to be; for I was later on told that it reached the town at
+about six o'clock. And here I was, at five, six and a half miles from
+its limits as the crow flies.
+
+I had hardly time to take in the details that I have described before I
+was enveloped in the folds of the fog. I mean this quite literally, for
+I am firmly convinced that an onlooker from behind would have seen the
+grey masses fold in like a sheet when I drove against them. It must have
+looked as if a driver were driving against a canvas moving in a slight
+breeze--canvas light and loose enough to be held in place by the
+resistance of the air so as to enclose him. Or maybe I should say
+"veiling" instead of canvas--or something still lighter and airier.
+Have you ever seen milk poured carefully down the side of a glass vessel
+filled with water? Well, clear air and fog seemed to behave towards
+each other pretty much the same way as milk in that case behaves towards
+water.
+
+I am rather emphatic about this because I have made a study of just such
+mists on a very much smaller scale. In that northern country where my
+wife taught her school and where I was to live for nearly two years as
+a convalescent, the hollows of the ground on clear cold summer nights,
+when the mercury dipped down close to the freezing point, would
+sometimes fill with a white mist of extraordinary density. Occasionally
+this mist would go on forming in higher and higher layers by
+condensation; mostly however, it seemed rather to come from below.
+But always, when it was really dense, there was a definite plane of
+demarcation. In fact, that was the criterion by which I recognised this
+peculiar mist. Mostly there is, even in the north, a layer of lesser
+density over the pools, gradually shading off into the clear air above.
+Nothing of what I am going to describe can be observed in that case.
+
+One summer, when I was living not over two miles from the lakeshore, I
+used to go down to these pools whenever they formed in the right way;
+and when I approached them slowly and carefully, I could dip my hand
+into the mist as into water, and I could feel the coolness of the
+misty layers. It was not because my hand got moist, for it did not. No
+evaporation was going on there, nor any condensation either. Nor did
+noticeable bubbles form because there was no motion in the mass which
+might have caused the infinitesimal droplets to collide and to coalesce
+into something perceivable to my senses.
+
+Once, of a full-moon night, I spent an hour getting into a pool like
+that, and when I looked down at my feet, I could not see them. But after
+I had been standing in it for a while, ten minutes maybe, a clear space
+had formed around my body, and I could see the ground. The heat of my
+body helped the air to redissolve the mist into steam. And as I watched,
+I noticed that a current was set up. The mist was continually flowing
+in towards my feet and legs where the body-heat was least. And where
+evaporation proceeded fastest, that is at the height of my waist, little
+wisps of mist would detach themselves from the side of the funnel of
+clear air in which I stood, and they would, in a slow, graceful motion,
+accelerated somewhat towards the last, describe a downward and inward
+curve towards the lower part of my body before they dissolved. I thought
+of that elusive and yet clearly defined layer of mist that forms in
+the plane of contact between the cold air flowing from Mammoth Cave
+in Kentucky and the ambient air of a sultry summer day. [Footnote: See
+Burroughs' wonderful description of this phenomenon in "Riverby."]
+
+On another of the rare occasions when the mists had formed in the
+necessary density I went out again, put a stone in my pocket and took a
+dog along. I approached a shallow mist pool with the greatest caution.
+The dog crouched low, apparently thinking that I was stalking some game.
+Then, when I had arrived within about ten or fifteen yards from the edge
+of the pool, I took the stone from my pocket, showed it to the dog, and
+threw it across the pool as fast and as far as I could. The dog dashed
+in and tore through the sheet. Where the impact of his body came, the
+mist bulged in, then broke. For a while there were two sheets, separated
+by a more or less clearly defined, vertical layer of transparency
+or maybe blackness rather. The two sheets were in violent commotion,
+approaching, impinging upon each other, swinging back again to complete
+separation, and so on. But the violence of the motion consisted by
+no means in speed: it suggested a very much retarded rolling off of a
+motion picture reel. There was at first an element of disillusion in the
+impression. I felt tempted to shout and to spur the mist into greater
+activity. On the surface, to both sides of the tear, waves ran out, and
+at the edges of the pool they rose in that same leisurely, stately
+way which struck me as one of the most characteristic features of that
+November mist; and at last it seemed as if they reared and reached up,
+very slowly as a dying man may stand up once more before he falls. And
+only after an interval that seemed unconscionably long to me the whole
+pool settled back to comparative smoothness, though without its definite
+plane of demarcation now. Strange to say, the dog had actually started
+something, a rabbit maybe or a jumping deer, and did not return.
+
+When fogs spread, as a rule they do so in air already saturated with
+moisture. What really spreads, is the cold air which by mixing with,
+and thereby cooling, the warmer, moisture-laden atmosphere causes
+the condensation. That is why our fall mists mostly are formed in an
+exceedingly slight but still noticeable breeze. But in the case of these
+northern mist pools, whenever the conditions are favourable for their
+formation, the moisture of the upper air seems to be pretty well
+condensed as dew It is only in the hollows of the ground that it remains
+suspended in this curious way. I cannot, so far, say whether it is due
+to the fact that where radiation is largely thrown back upon the walls
+of the hollow, the fall in temperature at first is very much slower
+than in the open, thus enabling the moisture to remain in suspension; or
+whether the hollows serve as collecting reservoirs for the cold air
+from the surrounding territory--the air carrying the already condensed
+moisture with it; or whether, lastly, it is simply due to a greater
+saturation of the atmosphere in these cavities, consequent upon the
+greater approach of their bottom to the level of the ground water. I
+have seen a "waterfall" of this mist overflow from a dent in the edge of
+ground that contained a pool. That seems to argue for an origin similar
+to that of a spring; as if strongly moisture-laden air welled up from
+underground, condensing its steam as it got chilled. It is these strange
+phenomena that are familiar, too, in the northern plains of Europe which
+must have given rise to the belief in elves and other weird creations of
+the brain--"the earth has bubbles as the water has"--not half as weird,
+though, as some realities are in the land which I love.
+
+Now this great, memorable fog of that November Friday shared the nature
+of the mist pools of the north in as much as to a certain extent it
+refused to mingle with the drier and slightly warmer air into which it
+travelled. It was different from them in as much as it fairly dripped
+and oozed with a very palpable wetness. Just how it displaced the air in
+its path, is something which I cannot with certainty say. Was it formed
+as a low layer somewhere over the lake and slowly pushed along by a
+gentle, imperceptible, fan-shaped current of air? Fan-shaped, I say;
+for, as we shall see, it travelled simultaneously south and north; and
+I must infer that in exactly the same way it travelled west. Or was it
+formed originally like a tremendous column which flattened out by and
+by, through its own greater gravity slowly displacing the lighter air in
+the lower strata? I do not know, but I am inclined to accept the latter
+explanation. I do know that it travelled at the rate of about six miles
+an hour; and its coming was observed somewhat in detail by two other
+observers besides myself--two people who lived twenty-five miles apart,
+one to the north, one to the south of where I hit it. Neither one was as
+much interested in things meteorological as I am, but both were struck
+by the unusual density of the fog, and while one saw it coming from the
+north, the other one saw it approaching from the south.
+
+I have no doubt that at last it began to mingle with the clearer air and
+to thin out; in fact, I have good testimony to that effect. And early
+next morning it was blown by a wind like an ordinary fog-cloud all over
+Portage Plains.
+
+I also know that further north, at my home, for instance, it had the
+smell of the smoke which could not have proceeded from anywhere but the
+marsh; and the marsh lay to the south of it. That seemed to prove that
+actually the mist was spreading from a common centre in at least two
+directions. These points, which I gathered later, strongly confirmed my
+own observations, which will be set down further on. It must, then,
+have been formed as a layer of a very considerable height, to be able to
+spread over so many square miles.
+
+As I said, I was reminded of those mist pools in the north when I
+approached the cliff of the fog, especially of that "waterfall" of mist
+of which I spoke. But besides the difference in composition--the fog,
+as we shall see, was not homogeneous, this being the cause of its
+wetness--there was another important point of distinction. For, while
+the mist of the pools is of the whitest white, this fog showed from the
+outside and in the mass--the single wreaths seemed white enough--rather
+the colour of that "wet, unbleached linen" of which Burroughs speaks in
+connection with rain-clouds.
+
+Now, as soon as I was well engulfed in the fog, I had a few surprises.
+I could no longer see the road ahead; I could not see the fence along
+which I had been driving; I saw the horses' rumps, but I did not see
+their heads. I bent forward over the dashboard: I could not even see
+the ground below It was a series of negatives. I stopped the horses. I
+listened--then looked at my watch. The stillness of the grave enveloped
+me. It was a little past five o'clock. The silence was oppressive--the
+misty impenetrability of the atmosphere was appalling. I do not say
+"darkness," for as yet it was not really dark. I could still see the
+dial of my watch clearly enough to read the time. But darkness was
+falling fast--"falling," for it seemed to come from above: mostly it
+rises--from out of the shadows under the trees--advancing, fighting back
+the powers of light above.
+
+One of the horses, I think it was Peter, coughed. It was plain they felt
+chilly. I thought of my lights and started with stiffening fingers
+to fumble at the valves of my gas tank. When reaching into my trouser
+pockets for matches, I was struck with the astonishing degree to which
+my furs had been soaked in these few minutes. As for wetness, the fog
+was like a sponge. At last, kneeling in the buggy box, I got things
+ready. I smelt the gas escaping from the burner of my bicycle lantern
+and heard it hissing in the headlight. The problem arose of how to light
+a match. I tried various places--without success. Even the seat of my
+trousers proved disappointing. I got a sizzling and sputtering flame, it
+is true, but it went out before I could apply it to the gas. The water
+began to drip from the backs of my hands. It was no rain because it did
+not fall. It merely floated along; but the droplets, though smaller,
+were infinitely more numerous than in a rain--there were more of them
+in a given space. At last I lifted the seat cushion under which I had a
+tool box filled with ropes, leather straps and all manner of things that
+I might ever be in need of during my nights in the open. There I found
+a dry spot where to strike the needed match. I got the bicycle lantern
+started. It burned quite well, and I rather admired it: unreasoningly
+I seemed to have expected that it would not burn in so strange an
+atmosphere. So I carefully rolled a sheet of letter paper into a fairly
+tight roll, working with my back to the fog and under the shelter of my
+big raccoon coat. I took a flame from the bicycle light and sheltered
+and nursed it along till I thought it would stand the drizzle. Then I
+turned and thrust the improvised torch into the bulky reflector case of
+the searchlight. The result was startling. A flame eighteen inches high
+leaped up with a crackling and hissing sound.
+
+The horses bolted, and the buggy jumped. I was lucky, for inertia
+carried me right back on the seat, and as soon as I had the lines in
+my hands again, I felt that the horses did not really mean it. I do not
+think we had gone more than two or three hundred yards before the team
+was under control. I stopped and adjusted the overturned valves. When
+I succeeded, I found to my disappointment that the heat of that first
+flame had partly spoiled the reflector. Still, my range of vision now
+extended to the belly-band in the horses' harness. The light that used
+to show me the road for about fifty feet in front of the horses' heads
+gave a short truncated cone of great luminosity, which was interesting
+and looked reassuring; but it failed to reach the ground, for it was so
+adjusted that the focus of the converging light rays lay ahead and not
+below. Before, therefore, the point of greatest luminosity was reached,
+the light was completely absorbed by the fog.
+
+I got out of the buggy, went to the horses' heads and patted their noses
+which were dripping with wetness. But now that I faced the headlight,
+I could see it though I had failed to see the horses' heads when seated
+behind it. This, too, was quite reassuring, for it meant that the horses
+probably could see the ground even though I did not.
+
+But where was I? I soon found out that we had shot off the trail. And to
+which side? I looked at my watch again. Already the incident had cost me
+half an hour. It was really dark by now, even outside the fog, for there
+was no moon. I tried out how far I could get away from the buggy without
+losing sight of the light. It was only a very few steps, not more than a
+dozen. I tried to visualize where I had been when I struck the fog. And
+fortunately my habit of observing the smallest details, even, if only
+subconsciously, helped me out. I concluded that the horses had bolted
+straight ahead, thus missing an s-shaped curve to the right.
+
+At this moment I heard Peter paw the ground impatiently; so I quickly
+returned to the horses, for I did not relish the idea of being left
+alone. There was an air of impatience and nervousness about both of
+them.
+
+I took my bicycle lantern and reached for the lines. Then, standing
+clear of the buggy, I turned the horses at right angles, to the north,
+as I imagined it to be. When we started, I walked alongside the team
+through dripping underbrush and held the lantern with my free hand close
+down to the ground.
+
+Two or three times I stopped during the next half hour, trying, since we
+still did not strike the trail, to reason out a different course. I was
+now wet through and through up to my knees; and I had repeatedly run
+into willow-clumps, which did not tend to make me any drier either. At
+last I became convinced that in bolting the horses must have swerved
+a little to the south, so that in starting up again we had struck a
+tangent to the big bend north, just beyond Bell's farm. If that was
+the case, we should have to make another turn to the right in order to
+strike the road again, for at best we were then simply going parallel
+to it. The trouble was that I had nothing to tell me the directions, not
+even a tree the bark or moss of which might have vouchsafed information.
+Suddenly I had an inspiration. Yes, the fog was coming from the
+northeast! So, by observing the drift of the droplets I could find at
+least an approximate meridian line. I went to the headlight, and an
+observation immediately confirmed my conjecture. I was now convinced
+that I was on that wild land where two months ago I had watched the
+goldfinches disporting themselves in the evening sun. But so as not to
+turn back to the south, I struck out at an angle of only about sixty
+degrees to my former direction. I tried not to swerve, which involved
+rough going, and I had many a stumble. Thus I walked for another half
+hour or thereabout.
+
+Then, certainly! This was the road! The horses turned into it of their
+own accord. That was the most reassuring thing of all. There was one
+strange doubt left. Somehow I was not absolutely clear about it whether
+north might not after all be behind. I stopped. Even a new observation
+of the fog did not remove the last vestige of a doubt. I had to take a
+chance, some landmark might help after a while.
+
+I believe in getting ready before I start. So I took my coal-oil
+lantern, lighted and suspended it under the rear springs of the buggy
+in such a way that it would throw its light back on the road. Having the
+light away down, I expected to be able to see at least whether I was
+on a road or not. In this I was only partly successful; for on the
+rut-trails nothing showed except the blades of grass and the tops of
+weeds; while on the grades where indeed I could make out the ground, I
+did not need a light, for, as I found out, I could more confidently rely
+on my ear.
+
+I got back to my seat and proceeded to make myself as comfortable as
+I could. I took off my shoes and socks keeping well under the
+robe--extracted a pair of heavy woollens from my suitcase under the
+seat, rubbed my feet dry and then wrapped up, without putting my shoes
+on again, as carefully and scientifically as only a man who has had
+pneumonia and is a chronic sufferer from pleuritis knows how to do.
+
+At last I proceeded. After listening again with great care for any sound
+I touched the horses with my whip, and they fell into a quiet trot. It
+was nearly seven now, and I had probably not yet made eight miles. We
+swung along. If I was right in my calculations and the horses kept
+to the road, I should strike the "twelve-mile bridge" in about
+three-quarters of an hour. That was the bridge leading through the
+cottonwood gate to the grade past the "hovel." I kept the watch in the
+mitt of my left hand.
+
+Not for a moment did it occur to me to turn back. Way up north there was
+a young woman preparing supper for me. The fog might not be there--she
+would expect me--I could not disappoint her. And then there was the
+little girl, who usually would wake up and in her "nightie" come out of
+bed and sleepily smile at me and climb on to my knee and nod off again.
+I thought of them, to be sure, of the hours and hours in wait for them,
+and a great tenderness came over me, and gratitude for the belated home
+they gave an aging man...
+
+And slowly my mind reverted to the things at hand. And this is what was
+the most striking feature about them: I was shut in, closed off from
+the world around. Apart from that cone of visibility in front of the
+headlight, and another much smaller one from the bicycle lamp, there was
+not a thing I could see. If the road was the right one, I was passing
+now through some square miles of wild land. Right and left there were
+poplar thickets, and ahead there was that line of stately cottonwoods.
+But no suggestion of a landmark--nothing except a cone of light which
+was filled with fog and cut into on both sides by two steaming and
+rhythmically moving horseflanks. It was like a very small room, this
+space of light--the buggy itself, in darkness, forming an alcove to it,
+in which my hand knew every well-appointed detail. Gradually, while
+I was warming up, a sense of infinite comfort came, and with it the
+enjoyment of the elvish aspect.
+
+I began to watch the fog. By bending over towards the dashboard and
+looking into the soon arrested glare I could make out the component
+parts of the fog. It was like the mixture of two immiscible
+liquids--oil, for instance, shaken up with water. A fine, impalpable,
+yet very dense mist formed the ground mass. But in it there floated
+myriads of droplets, like the droplets of oil in water. These droplets
+would sometimes sparkle in a mild, unobtrusive way as they were nearing
+the light; and then they would dash against the pane and keep it
+dripping, dripping down.
+
+I leaned back again; and I watched the whole of the light-cone. Snow
+white wisps would float and whirl through it in graceful curves, stirred
+into motion by the horses' trot. Or a wreath of it would start to dance,
+as if gently pulled or plucked at from above; and it would revolve,
+faster towards the end, and fade again into the shadows behind. I
+thought of a summer in Norrland, in Sweden, in the stone-and-birch waste
+which forms the timberline, where I had also encountered the mist pools.
+And a trip down a stream in the borderland of the Finns came back with
+great vividness into my mind. That trip had been made in a fog like
+this; only it had been begun in the early morning, and the whole mass
+of the mist had been suffused with the whitest of lights. But strange
+to say, what stood out most strikingly in the fleeting memory of the
+voyage, was the weird and mocking laughter of the magpies all along the
+banks. The Finnish woods seemed alive with that mocking laughter, and
+it truly belongs to the land of the mists. For a moment I thought
+that something after all was missing here on the prairies. But then I
+reflected again that this silence of the grave was still more perfect,
+still more uncanny and ghostly, because it left the imagination entirely
+free, without limiting it by even as much as a suggestion.
+
+No wonder, I thought, that the Northerners in their land of heath and
+bog were the poets of elves and goblins and of the fear of ghosts.
+Shrouds were these fogs, hanging and waving and floating shrouds!
+Mocking spirits were plucking at them and setting them into their gentle
+motions. Gleams of light, that dance over the bog, lured you in, and
+once caught in these veils after veils of mystery, madness would seize
+you, and you would wildly dash here and there in a vain attempt at
+regaining your freedom; and when, exhausted at last, you broke down and
+huddled together on the ground, the werwolf would come, ghostly himself,
+and huge and airy and weird, his body woven of mist, and in the fog's
+stately and leisurely way he would kneel down on your chest,
+slowly crushing you beneath his exceeding weight; and bending and
+straightening, bending and stretching, slowly--slowly down came his head
+to your throat; and then he would lie and not stir until morning and
+suck; and after few or many days people would find you, dead in the
+woods--a victim of fog and mist...
+
+A rumbling sound made me sit up at last. We were crossing over the
+"twelve-mile bridge." In spite of my dreaming I was keeping my eyes on
+the look-out for any sign of a landmark, but this was the only one I
+had known so far, and it came through the ear, not the eye. I promptly
+looked back and up, to where the cottonwoods must be; but no sign of
+high, weeping trees, no rustling of fall-dry leaves, not even a deeper
+black in the black betrayed their presence. Well, never before had I
+failed to see some light, to hear some sound around the house of the
+"moneyed" type or those of the "half way farms." Surely, somehow I
+should be aware of their presence when I got there! Some sign, some
+landmark would tell me how far I had gone!... The horses were trotting
+along, steaming, through the brewing fog. I had become all ear. Even
+though my buggy was silent and though the road was coated with a thin
+film of soft clay-mud, I could distinctly hear by the muffled thud of
+the horses' hoofs on the ground that they were running over a grade.
+That confirmed my bearings. I had no longer a moment's doubt or anxiety
+over my drive.
+
+The grade was left behind, the rut-road started again, was passed
+and outrun. So now I was close to the three-farm cluster. I listened
+intently for the horses' thump. Yes, there was that muffled hoof-beat
+again--I was on the last grade that led to the angling road across the
+corner of the marsh.
+
+Truly, this was very much like lying down in the sleeping-car of an
+overland train. You recline and act as if nothing unusual were going on;
+and meanwhile a force that has something irresistible about it and is
+indeed largely beyond your control, wafts you over mile after mile of
+fabled distance; now and then the rumble of car on rail will stop, the
+quiet awakens you, lights flash their piercing darts, a voice calls out;
+it is a well known stop on your journey and then the rumbling resumes,
+you doze again, to be awakened again, and so on. And when you get up
+in the morning--there she lies, the goal of your dreams-the resplendent
+city...
+
+My goal was my "home," and mildly startling, at least one such
+mid-nightly awakening came. I had kept peering about for a landmark,
+a light. Somewhere here in those farmhouses which I saw with my mind's
+eye, people were sitting around their fireside, chatting or reading.
+Lamps shed their homely light; roof and wall kept the fog-spook securely
+out: nothing as comfortable then as to listen to stories of being lost
+on the marsh, or to tell them... But between those people and myself
+the curtain had fallen--no sign of their presence, no faintest gleam
+of their light and warmth! They did not know of the stranger passing
+outside, his whole being a-yearn with the desire for wife and child.
+I listened intently--no sound of man or beast, no soughing of wind in
+stems or rustling of the very last leaves that were now fast falling...
+And then the startling neighing of Dan, my horse! This was the third
+trip he made with me, and I might have known and expected it, but it
+always came as a surprise. Whenever we passed that second farm, he
+stopped and raising his head, with a sideways motion, neighed a loud and
+piercing call. And now he had stopped and done it again. He knew where
+we were. I lowered my whip and patted his rump. How did he know? And why
+did he do it? Was there a horse on this farmstead which he had known in
+former life? Or was it a man? Or did he merely feel that it was about
+time to put in for the night? I enquired later on, but failed to
+discover any reason for his behaviour.
+
+Now came that angling road past the "White Range Line House." I relied
+on the horses entirely. This "Range Line House" was inhabited now--a
+settler was putting in winter-residence so he might not lose his claim.
+He had taken down the clapboards that closed the windows, and always had
+I so far seen a light in the house.
+
+It seemed to me that in this corner of the marsh the fog was less dense
+than it had been farther south, and the horses, once started, were
+swinging along though in a leisurely way, yet without hesitation.
+Another half hour passed. Once, at a bend in the trail, the rays from
+the powerful tractor searchlight, sweeping sideways past the horses,
+struck a wetly glistening, greyish stone to the right of the road. I
+knew that stone. Yes, surely the fog must be thinning, or I could not
+have seen it. I could now also dimly make out the horses' heads, as they
+nodded up and down...
+
+And then, like a phantom, way up in the mist, I made out a blacker black
+in the black--the majestic poplars north of the "Range Line House." Not
+that I could really see them or pick out the slightest detail--no! But
+it seemed to my searching eyes as if there was a quiet pool in the slow
+flow of the fog--as the water in a slow flowing stream will come to rest
+when it strikes the stems of a willow submerged at its margin. I was
+trying even at the time to decide how much of what I seemed to divine
+rather than to perceive was imagination and how much reality. And I was
+just about ready to contend that I also saw to the north something like
+the faintest possible suggestion of an eddy, such as would form in the
+flowing water below a pillar or a rock--when I was rudely shaken up and
+jolted.
+
+Trap, trap, I heard the horses' feet on the culvert. Crash! And Peter
+went stumbling down. Then a violent lurch of the buggy, I holding
+on--Peter rallied, and then, before I had time to get a firmer grasp
+on the lines, both horses bolted again. It took me some time to realize
+what had happened. It was the culvert, of course; it had broken down,
+and lucky I was that the ditch underneath was shallow. Only much later,
+when reflecting upon the incident, did I see that this accident was
+really the best verification of what I was nearly inclined to regard as
+the product of my imagination. The trees must indeed have stood where I
+had seemed to see that quiet reach in the fog and that eddy...
+
+We tore along. I spoke to the horses and quietly and evenly pulled at
+the lines. I think it must have been several minutes before I had
+them under control again. And then--in this night of weird things--the
+weirdest sight of them all showed ahead.
+
+I was just beginning to wonder, whether after all we had not lost the
+road again, when the faintest of all faint glimmers began to define
+itself somewhere in front. And... was I right? Yes, a small, thin voice
+came out of the fog that incessantly floated into my cone of light and
+was left behind in eddies. What did it mean?...
+
+The glimmer was now defining itself more clearly. Somewhere, not very
+far ahead and slightly to the left, a globe of the faintest iridescent
+luminosity seemed suspended in the brewing and waving mist. The horses
+turned at right angles on to the bridge, the glimmer swinging round to
+the other side of the buggy. Their hoofs struck wood, and both beasts
+snorted and stopped.
+
+In a flash a thought came. I had just broken through a culvert--the
+bridge, too, must have broken down, and somebody had put a light there
+to warn the chance traveller who might stray along on a night like this!
+I was on the point of getting out of my wraps, when a thinner wave in
+the mist permitted me to see the flames of three lanterns hung to the
+side-rails of the bridge. And that very moment a thin, piping voice came
+out of the darkness beyond. "Daddy, is that you?" I did not know the
+child's voice, but I sang out as cheerily as I could. "I am a daddy all
+right, but I am afraid, not yours. Is the bridge broken down, sonny?
+Anything wrong?" "No, Sir," the answer came, "nothing wrong." So I
+pulled up to the lanterns, and there I saw, dimly enough, God wot, a
+small, ten-year old boy standing and shivering by the signal which
+he had rigged up. He was barefooted and bareheaded, in shirt and torn
+knee-trousers. I pointed to the lanterns with my whip. "What's the
+meaning of this, my boy?" I asked in as friendly a voice as I could
+muster. "Daddy went to town this morning," he said rather haltingly,
+"and he must have got caught in the fog. We were afraid he might not
+find the bridge." "Well, cheer up, son," I said, "he is not the only
+one as you see; his horses will know the road. Where did he go?" The boy
+named the town--it was to the west, not half the distance away that I
+had come. "Don't worry," I said; "I don't think he has started out at
+all. The fog caught me about sixteen miles south of here. It's nine
+o'clock now If he had started before the fog got there, he would be here
+by now." I sat and thought for a moment. Should I say anything about
+the broken culvert? "Which way would your daddy come, along the creek or
+across the marsh?" "Along the creek." All right then, no use in saying
+anything further. "Well, as I said," I sang out and clicked my tongue
+to the horses, "don't worry; better go home; he will come to-morrow"
+"I guess so," replied the boy the moment I lost sight of him and the
+lanterns.
+
+I made the turn to the southeast and walked my horses. Here, where the
+trail wound along through the chasm of the bush, the light from my cone
+would, over the horses' backs, strike twigs and leaves now and then.
+Everything seemed to drip and to weep. All nature was weeping I walked
+the horses for ten minutes more. Then I stopped. It must have been just
+at the point where the grade began; but I do not know for sure.
+
+I fumbled a long while for my shoes; but at last I found them and put
+them on over my dry woollens. When I had shaken myself out of my robes,
+I jumped to the ground. There was, here, too, a film of mud on top, but
+otherwise the road was firm enough. I quickly threw the blankets over
+the horses' backs, dropped the traces, took the bits out of their
+mouths, and slipped the feed-bags over their heads. I looked at my
+watch, for it was my custom to let them eat for just ten minutes, then
+to hook them up again and walk them for another ten before trotting. I
+had found that that refreshed them enough to make the remainder of the
+trip in excellent shape.
+
+While I was waiting, I stood between the wheels of the buggy, leaning
+against the box and staring into the light. It was with something akin
+to a start that I realized the direction from which the fog rolled by:
+it came from the south! I had, of course, seen that already, but it had
+so far not entered my consciousness as a definite observation. It was
+this fact that later set me to thinking about the origin of the fog
+along the lines which I have indicated above. Again I marvelled at the
+density of the mist which somehow seemed greater while we were standing
+than while we were driving. I had repeatedly been in the clouds, on
+mountainsides, but they seemed light and thin as compared with this.
+Finland, Northern Sweden, Canada--no other country which I knew had
+anything resembling it. The famous London fogs are different altogether.
+These mists, like the mist pools, need the swamp as their mother, I
+suppose, and the ice-cool summer night for their nurse...
+
+The time was up. I quickly did what had to be done, and five minutes
+later we were on the road again. I watched the horses for a while, and
+suddenly I thought once more of that fleeting impression of an eddy in
+the lee of the poplar bluff at the "White Range Line House." It was on
+the north side of the trees, if it was there at all! The significance of
+the fact had escaped me at the time. It again confirmed my observation
+of the flow of the fog in both directions. It came from a common centre.
+And still there was no breath of air. I had no doubt any longer; it
+was not the air that pushed the fog; the floating bubbles, the
+infinitesimally small ones as well as those that were quite perceptible,
+simply displaced the lighter atmosphere. I wondered what kept these
+bubbles apart. Some repellent force with which they were charged?
+Something, at any rate, must be preventing them from coalescing into
+rain. Maybe it was merely the perfect evenness of their flow, for they
+gathered thickly enough on the twigs and the few dried leaves, on any
+obstacles in their way. And again I thought of the fact that the mist
+had seemed thinner when I came out on the marsh. This double flow
+explained it, of course. There were denser and less dense waves in
+it: like veils hung up one behind the other. So long as I went in a
+direction opposite to its flow, I had to look through sheet after sheet
+of the denser waves. Later I could every now and then look along a plane
+of lesser density...
+
+It was Dan who found the turn off the grade into the bushy glades. I
+could see distinctly how he pushed Peter over. Here, where again the
+road was winding, and where the light, therefore, once more frequently
+struck the twigs and boughs, as they floated into my cone of luminosity,
+to disappear again behind, a new impression thrust itself upon me. I
+call it an impression, not an observation. It is very hard to say, what
+was reality, what fancy on a night like that. In spite of its air of
+unreality, of improbability even, it has stayed with me as one of my
+strongest visions. I nearly hesitate to put it in writing.
+
+These boughs and twigs were like fingers held into a stream that carried
+loose algae, arresting them in their gliding motion. Or again, those
+wisps of mist were like gossamers as they floated along, and they would
+bend and fold over on the boughs before they tore; and where they broke,
+they seemed like comets to trail a thinner tail of themselves behind.
+There was tenacity in them, a certain consistency which made them appear
+as if woven of different things from air and mere moisture. I have
+often doubted my memory here, and yet I have my very definite notes, and
+besides there is the picture in my mind. In spite of my own uncertainty
+I can assure you, that this is only one quarter a poem woven of
+impressions; the other three quarters are reality. But, while I am
+trying to set down facts, I am also trying to render moods and images
+begot by them...
+
+We went on for an hour, and it lengthened out into two. No twigs and
+boughs any longer, at last. But where I was, I knew not. Much as I
+listened, I could not make out any difference in the tramp of the horses
+now I looked down over the back of my buggy seat, and I seemed to see
+the yellow or brownish clay of a grade. I went on rather thoughtlessly.
+Then, about eleven o'clock, I noticed that the road was rough. I had
+long since, as I said, given myself over to the horses. But now I grew
+nervous. No doubt, unless we had entirely strayed from our road, we were
+by this time riding the last dam; for no other trail over which we
+went was quite so rough. But then I should have heard the rumble on the
+bridge, and I felt convinced that I had not. It shows to what an extent
+a man may be hypnotised into insensibility by a constant sameness of
+view, that I was mistaken. If we were on the dam and missed the turn at
+the end of it, on to the correction line, we should infallibly go down
+from the grade, on to muskeg ground, for there was a gap in the dam. At
+that place I had seen a horse disappear, and many a cow had ended there
+in the deadly struggle against the downward suck of the swamp...
+
+I pulled the horses back to a walk, and we went on for another half
+hour. I was by this time sitting on the left hand side of the side,
+bicycle lantern in my left hand, and bending over as far as I could to
+the left, trying, with arm outstretched, to reach the ground with my
+light. The lantern at the back of the buggy was useless for this. Here
+and there the drop-laden, glistening tops of the taller grasses and
+weeds would float into this auxiliary cone of light--but that was all.
+
+Then no weeds appeared any longer, so I must be on the last half-mile of
+the dam, the only piece of it that was bare and caution extreme was the
+word. I made up my mind to go on riding for another five minutes and
+timed myself, for there was hardly enough room for a team and a walking
+man besides. When the time was up, I pulled in and got out. I took
+the lines short, laid my right hand on Peter's back and proceeded. The
+bicycle lantern was hanging down from my left and showed plainly the
+clayey gravel of the dam. And so I walked on for maybe ten minutes.
+
+Suddenly I became again aware of a glimmer to the left, and the very
+next moment a lantern shot out of the mist, held high by an arm wrapped
+in white. A shivering woman, tall, young, with gleaming eyes, dressed
+in a linen house dress, an apron flung over breast and shoulders, gasped
+out two words, "You came!" "Have you been standing here and waiting?" I
+asked. "No, no! I just could not bear it any longer. Something told me.
+He's at the culvert now, and if I do not run, he will go down into the
+swamp!" There was something of a catch in the voice. I did not reply I
+swung the horses around and crossed the culvert that bridges the master
+ditch.
+
+And while we were walking up to the yard--had my drive been anything
+brave--anything at all deserving of the slightest reward--had it not in
+itself been a thing of beauty, not to be missed by selfish me--surely,
+the touch of that arm, as we went, would have been more than enough to
+reward even the most chivalrous deeds of yore.
+
+
+
+
+THREE. Dawn and Diamonds
+
+Two days before Christmas the ground was still bare. I had a splendid
+new cutter with a top and side curtains; a heavy outfit, but one that
+would stand up, I believed, under any road conditions. I was anxious to
+use it, too, for I intended to spend a two weeks' holiday up north with
+my family. I was afraid, if I used the buggy, I might find it impossible
+to get back to town, seeing that the first heavy winter storms usually
+set in about the turn of the year.
+
+School had closed at noon. I intended to set out next morning at as
+early an hour as I could. I do not know what gave me my confidence, but
+I firmly expected to find snow on the ground by that time. I am rather
+a student of the weather. I worked till late at night getting my cutter
+ready. I had to adjust my buggy pole and to stow away a great number of
+parcels. The latter contained the first real doll for my little girl,
+two or three picture books, a hand sleigh, Pip--a little stuffed dog of
+the silkiest fluffiness--and as many more trifles for wife and child as
+my Christmas allowance permitted me to buy. It was the first time in the
+five years of my married life that, thanks to my wife's co-operation in
+earning money, there was any Christmas allowance to spend; and since I
+am writing this chiefly for her and the little girl's future reading,
+I want to set it down here, too, that it was thanks to this very same
+co-operation that I had been able to buy the horses and the driving
+outfit which I needed badly, for the poor state of my health forbade
+more rigorous exercise. I have already said, I think, that I am
+essentially an outdoor creature; and for several years the fact that I
+had been forced to look at the out-of-doors from the window of a town
+house only, had been eating away at my vitality. Those drives took
+decades off my age, and in spite of incurable illness my few friends say
+that I look once more like a young man.
+
+Besides my Christmas parcels I had to take oats along, enough to feed
+the horses for two weeks. And I was, as I said, engaged that evening in
+stowing everything away, when about nine o'clock one of the physicians
+of the town came into the stable. He had had a call into the country, I
+believe, and came to order a team. When he saw me working in the shed,
+he stepped up and said, "You'll kill your horses." "Meaning?" I queried.
+"I see you are getting your cutter ready," he replied. "If I were you, I
+should stick to the wheels." I laughed. "I might not be able to get back
+to work." "Oh yes," he scoffed, "it won't snow up before the end of
+next month. We figure on keeping the cars going for a little while yet."
+Again I laughed. "I hope not," I said, which may not have sounded very
+gracious.
+
+At ten o'clock every bolt had been tightened, the horses' harness and
+their feed were ready against the morning, and everything looked good to
+me.
+
+I was going to have the first real Christmas again in twenty-five years,
+with a real Christmas tree, and with wife and child, and even though
+it was a poor man's Christmas, I refused to let anything darken my
+Christmas spirit or dull the keen edge of my enjoyment. Before going
+out, I stepped into the office of the stable, slipped a half-dollar into
+the hostler's palm and asked him once more to be sure to have the horses
+fed at half-past five in the morning.
+
+Then I left. A slight haze filled the air, not heavy enough to blot out
+the stars; but sufficient to promise hoarfrost at least. Somehow there
+was no reason to despair as yet of Christmas weather.
+
+I went home and to bed and slept about as soundly as I could wish. When
+the alarm of my clock went off at five in the morning, I jumped out of
+bed and hurried down to shake the fire into activity. As soon as I had
+started something of a blaze, I went to the window and looked out. It
+was pitch dark, of course, the moon being down by this time, but it
+seemed to me that there was snow on the ground. I lighted a lamp and
+held it to the window; and sure enough, its rays fell on white upon
+white on shrubs and fence posts and window ledge. I laughed and
+instantly was in a glow of impatience to be off.
+
+At half past five, when the coffee water was in the kettle and on the
+stove, I hurried over to the stable across the bridge. The snow was
+three inches deep, enough to make the going easy for the horses. The
+slight haze persisted, and I saw no stars. At the stable I found, of
+course, that the horses had not been fed; so I gave them oats and
+hay and went to call the hostler. When after much knocking at last
+he responded to my impatience, he wore a guilty look on his face but
+assured me that he was just getting up to feed my team. "Never mind
+about feeding," I said "I've done that. But have them harnessed and
+hitched up by a quarter past six. I'll water them on the road." They
+never drank their fill before nine o'clock. And I hurried home to get my
+breakfast...
+
+"Merry Christmas!" the hostler called after me; and I shouted back over
+my shoulder, "The same to you." The horses were going under the merry
+jingle of the bells which they carried for the first time this winter.
+
+I rarely could hold them down to a walk or a trot now, since the
+cold weather had set in; and mostly, before they even had cleared the
+slide-doors, they were in a gallop. Peter had changed his nature since
+he had a mate. By feeding and breeding he was so much Dan's superior in
+vitality that, into whatever mischief the two got themselves, he was
+the leader. For all times the picture, seen by the light of a lantern,
+stands out in my mind how he bit at Dan, wilfully, urging him playfully
+on, when we swung out into the crisp, dark, hazy morning air. Dan being
+nothing loth and always keen at the start, we shot across the bridge.
+
+It was hard now, mostly, to hitch them up. They would leap and rear
+with impatience when taken into the open before they were hooked to the
+vehicle. They were being very well fed, and though once a week they had
+the hardest of work, for the rest of the time they had never more than
+enough to limber them up, for on schooldays I used to take them out for
+a spin of three or four miles only, after four. At home, when I left, my
+wife and I would get them ready in the stable; then I took them out and
+lined them up in front of the buggy. My wife quickly took the lines: I
+hooked the traces up, jumped in, grabbed for the lines and waved my last
+farewell from the road afar off. Even at that they got away from us
+once or twice and came very near upsetting and wrecking the buggy; but
+nothing serious ever happened during the winter. I had to have horses
+like that, for I needed their speed and their staying power, as the
+reader will see if he cares to follow me very much farther.
+
+We flew along--the road seemed ideal--the air was wonderfully crisp and
+cold--my cutter fulfilled the highest expectations--the horses revelled
+in speed. But soon I pulled them down to a trot, for I followed the
+horsemen's rules whenever I could, and Dan, as I mentioned, was anyway
+rather too keen at the start for steady work later on. I settled back.
+The top of my cutter was down, for not a breath stirred; and I was
+always anxious to see as much of the country as I could...
+
+Do you know which is the stillest hour of the night? The hour before
+dawn. It is at that time, too, that in our winter nights the mercury
+dips down to its lowest level. Perhaps the two things have a causal
+relation--whatever there is of wild life in nature, withdraws more
+deeply within itself; it curls up and dreams. On calm summer mornings
+you hear no sound except the chirping and twittering of the sleeping
+birds. The birds are great dreamers--like dogs; like dogs they will
+twitch and stir in their sleep, as if they were running and flying and
+playing and chasing each other. Just stalk a bird's nest of which you
+know at half past two in the morning, some time during the month of
+July; and before you see them, you will hear them. If there are young
+birds in the nest, all the better; take the mother bird off and the
+little ones will open their beaks, all mouth as they are, and go to
+sleep again; and they will stretch their featherless little wings; and
+if they are a little bit older, they will even try to move their tiny
+legs, as if longing to use them. As with dogs, it is the young ones
+that dream most. I suppose their impressions are so much more vivid, the
+whole world is so new to them that it rushes in upon them charged
+with emotion. Emotions penetrate even us to a greater depth than mere
+apperceptions; so they break through that crust that seems to envelop
+the seat of our memory, and once inside, they will work out again into
+some form of consciousness--that of sleep or of the wakeful dream which
+we call memory.
+
+The stillest hour! In starlit winter nights the heavenly bodies seem to
+take on an additional splendour, something next to blazing, overweening
+boastfulness. "Now sleeps the world," they seem to say, "but we are
+awake and weaving destiny" And on they swing on their immutable paths.
+
+The stillest hour! If you step out of a sleeping house and are alone,
+you are apt to hold your breath; and if you are not, you are apt to
+whisper. There is an expectancy in the air, a fatefulness--a loud word
+would be blasphemy that offends the ear and the feeling of decency It
+is the hour of all still things, the silent things that pass like dreams
+through the night. You seem to stand hushed. Stark and bare, stripped of
+all accidentals, the universe swings on its way.
+
+The stillest hour! But how much stiller than still, when the earth has
+drawn over its shoulders that morning mist that allows of no slightest
+breath--when under the haze the very air seems to lie curled and to have
+gone to sleep. And yet how portentous! The haze seems to brood. It seems
+somehow to suggest that there is all of life asleep on earth. You
+seem to feel rather than to hear the whole creation breathing in
+its sleep--as if it was soundlessly stirring in dreams--presently to
+stretch, to awake. There is also the delicacy, the tenderness of all
+young things about it. Even in winter it reminds me of the very first
+unfolding of young leaves on trees; of the few hours while they are
+still hanging down, unable to raise themselves up as yet; they look so
+worldlywise sometimes, so precocious, and before them there still lie
+all hopes and all disappointments... In clear nights you forget the
+earth--under the hazy cover your eye is thrown back upon it. It is the
+contrast of the universe and of creation.
+
+We drove along--and slowly, slowly came the dawn. You could not define
+how it came. The whole world seemed to pale and to whiten, and that was
+all. There was no sunrise. It merely seemed as if all of Nature--very
+gradually--was soaking itself full of some light; it was dim at first,
+but never grey; and then it became the whitest, the clearest, the most
+undefinable light. There were no shadows. Under the brush of the wild
+land which I was skirting by now there seemed to be quite as much of
+luminosity as overhead. The mist was the thinnest haze, and it seemed to
+derive its whiteness as much from the virgin snow on the ground as from
+above. I could not cease to marvel at this light which seemed to be
+without a source--like the halo around the Saviour's face. The eye as
+yet did not reach very far, and wherever I looked, I found but one word
+to describe it: impalpable--and that is saying what it was not rather
+than what it was. As I said, there was no sunshine, but the light was
+there, omnipresent, diffused, coming mildly, softly, but from all sides,
+and out of all things as well as into them.
+
+Shakespeare has this word in Macbeth, and I had often pondered on it:
+
+   So fair and foul a day I have not seen.
+
+This was it, I thought. We have such days about four or five times
+a year--and none but the northern countries have them. There are
+clouds--or rather, there is a uniform layer of cloud, very high, and
+just the slightest suggestion of curdiness in it; and the light is very
+white. These days seem to waken in me every wander instinct that
+lay asleep. There is nothing definite, nothing that seems to be
+emphasized--something seems to beckon to me and to invite me to take to
+my wings and just glide along--without beating of wings--as if I could
+glide without sinking, glide and still keep my height... If you see the
+sun at all--as I did not on this day of days--he stands away up, very
+distant and quite aloof. He looks more like the moon than like his own
+self, white and heatless and lightless, as if it were not he at all from
+whom all this transparency and visibility proceeded.
+
+I have lived in southern countries, and I have travelled rather far for
+a single lifetime. Like an epic stretch my memories into dim and ever
+receding pasts. I have drunk full and deep from the cup of creation.
+The Southern Cross is no strange sight to my eyes. I have slept in the
+desert close to my horse, and I have walked on Lebanon. I have cruised
+in the seven seas and seen the white marvels of ancient cities reflected
+in the wave of incredible blueness. But then I was young. When the years
+began to pile up, I longed to stake off my horizons, to flatten out my
+views. I wanted the simpler, the more elemental things, things cosmic
+in their associations, nearer to the beginning or end of creation. The
+parrot that flashed through "nutmeg groves" did not hold out so much
+allurement as the simple gray-and-slaty junco. The things that are
+unobtrusive and differentiated by shadings only--grey in grey above
+all--like our northern woods, like our sparrows, our wolves--they held
+a more compelling attraction than orgies of colour and screams of sound.
+So I came home to the north. On days like this, however, I should like
+once more to fly out and see the tireless wave and the unconquerable
+rock. But I should like to see them from afar and dimly only--as Moses
+saw the promised land. Or I should like to point them out to a younger
+soul and remark upon the futility and innate vanity of things.
+
+And because these days take me out of myself, because they change my
+whole being into a very indefinite longing and dreaming, I wilfully blot
+from my vision whatever enters. If I meet a tree, I see it not. If
+I meet a man, I pass him by without speaking. I do not care to be
+disturbed. I do not care to follow even a definite thought. There is
+sadness in the mood, such sadness as enters--strange to say--into a
+great and very definitely expected disappointment. It is an exceedingly
+delicate sadness--haughty, aloof like the sun, and like him cool to the
+outer world. It does not even want sympathy; it merely wants to be left
+alone.
+
+It strangely chimed in with my mood on this particular and very perfect
+morning that no jolt shook me up, that we glided along over virgin snow
+which had come soft-footedly over night, in a motion, so smooth and
+silent as to suggest that wingless flight...
+
+We spurned the miles, and I saw them not. As if in a dream we turned in
+at one of the "half way farms," and the horses drank. And we went on
+and wound our way across that corner of the marsh. We came to the "White
+Range Line House," and though there were many things to see, I still
+closed the eye of conscious vision and saw them not. We neared the
+bridge, and we crossed it; and then--when I had turned southeast--on to
+the winding log-road through the bush--at last the spell that was cast
+over me gave way and broke. My horses fell into their accustomed walk,
+and at last I saw.
+
+Now, what I saw, may not be worth the describing, I do not know. It
+surely is hardly capable of being described. But if I had been led
+through fairylands or enchanted gardens, I could not have been awakened
+to a truer day of joy, to a greater realization of the good will towards
+all things than I was here.
+
+Oh, the surpassing beauty of it! There stood the trees, motionless under
+that veil of mist, and not their slenderest finger but was clothed in
+white. And the white it was! A translucent white, receding into itself,
+with strange backgrounds of white behind it--a modest white, and yet
+full of pride. An elusive white, and yet firm and substantial. The
+white of a diamond lying on snow white velvet, the white of a diamond
+in diffused light. None of the sparkle and colour play that the most
+precious of stones assumes under a definite, limited light which
+proceeds from a definite, limited source. Its colour play was suggested,
+it is true, but so subdued that you hardly thought of naming or even
+recognising its component parts. There was no red or yellow or blue or
+violet, but merely that which might flash into red and yellow and blue
+and violet, should perchance the sun break forth and monopolize
+the luminosity of the atmosphere. There was, as it were, a latent
+opalescence.
+
+And every twig and every bough, every branch and every limb, every trunk
+and every crack even in the bark was furred with it. It seemed as if
+the hoarfrost still continued to form. It looked heavy, and yet it was
+nearly without weight. Not a twig was bent down under its load, yet with
+its halo of frost it measured fully two inches across. The crystals were
+large, formed like spearheads, flat, slablike, yet of infinite thinness
+and delicacy, so thin and light that, when by misadventure my whip
+touched the boughs, the flakes seemed to float down rather than to fall.
+And every one of these flat and angular slabs was fringed with hairlike
+needles, or with featherlike needles, and longer needles stood in
+between. There was such an air of fragility about it all that you hated
+to touch it--and I, for one, took my whip down lest it shook bare too
+many boughs.
+
+Whoever has seen the trees like that--and who has not?--will see with
+his mind's eye what I am trying to suggest rather than to describe. It
+was never the single sight nor the isolated thing that made my drives
+the things of beauty which they were. There was nothing remarkable in
+them either. They were commonplace enough. I really do not know why I
+should feel urged to describe our western winters. Whatever I may be
+able to tell you about them, is yours to see and yours to interpret. The
+gifts of Nature are free to all for the asking. And yet, so it seems to
+me, there is in the agglomerations of scenes and impressions, as they
+followed each other in my experience, something of the quality of a
+great symphony; and I consider this quality as a free and undeserved
+present which Chance or Nature shook out of her cornucopia so it
+happened to fall at my feet. I am trying to render this quality here for
+you.
+
+On that short mile along the first of the east-west grades, before again
+I turned into the bush, I was for the thousandth time in my life struck
+with the fact how winter blots out the sins of utility. What is useful,
+is often ugly because in our fight for existence we do not always
+have time or effort to spare to consider the looks of things. But the
+slightest cover of snow will bury the eyesores. Snow is the greatest
+equalizer in Nature. No longer are there fields and wild lands,
+beautiful trails and ugly grades--all are hidden away under that which
+comes from Nature's purest hands and fertile thoughts alone. Now there
+was no longer the raw, offending scar on Nature's body; just a smooth
+expanse of snow white ribbon that led afar.
+
+That led afar! And here is a curious fact. On this early December
+morning--it was only a little after nine when I started the horses into
+their trot again--I noticed for the first time that this grade which
+sprang here out of the bush opened up to the east a vista into a
+seemingly endless distance. Twenty-six times I had gone along this piece
+of it, but thirteen times it had been at night, and thirteen times I
+had been facing west, when I went back to the scene of my work. So I
+had never looked east very far. This morning, however, in this strange
+light, which was at this very hour undergoing a subtle change that I
+could not define as yet, mile after mile of road seemed to lift itself
+up in the far away distance, as if you might drive on for ever through
+fairyland. The very fact of its straightness, flanked as it was by the
+rows of frosted trees, seemed like a call. And a feeling that is very
+familiar to me--that of an eternity in the perpetuation of whatever may
+be the state I happen to be in, came over me, and a desire to go on and
+on, for ever, and to see what might be beyond...
+
+But then the turn into the bushy trail was reached. I did not see the
+slightest sign of it on the road. But Dan seemed infallible--he made
+the turn. And again I was in Winter's enchanted palace, again the slight
+whirl in the air that our motion set up made the fairy tracery of
+the boughs shower down upon me like snow white petals of flowers, so
+delicate that to disturb the virginity of it all seemed like profaning
+the temple of the All-Highest.
+
+But then I noticed that I had not been the first one to visit the
+woods. All over their soft-napped carpet floor there were the restless,
+fleeting tracks of the snowflake, lacing and interlacing in lines and
+loops, as if they had been assembled in countless numbers, as no doubt
+they had. And every track looked like nothing so much as like that kind
+of embroidery, done white upon white, which ladies, I think; call the
+feather stitch. In places I could clearly see how they had chased and
+pursued each other, running, and there was a merriness about their
+spoors, a suggestion of swiftness which made me look up and about to
+see whether they were not wheeling their restless curves and circles
+overhead. But in this I was disappointed for the moment, though only a
+little later I was to see them in numbers galore. It was on that last
+stretch of my road, when I drove along the dam of the angling ditch.
+There they came like a whirlwind and wheeled and curved and circled
+about as if they knew no enemy, feeding meanwhile with infallible skill
+from the tops of seed-bearing weeds while skimming along. But I am
+anticipating just now In the bush I saw only their trails. Yet they
+suggested their twittering and whistling even there; and since on the
+gloomiest day their sound and their sight will cheer you, you surely
+cannot help feeling glad and overflowing with joy when you see any sign
+of them on a day like this!
+
+Meanwhile we were winging along ourselves, so it seemed. For there was
+the second east-west grade ahead. And that made me think of wife and
+child to whom I was coming like Santa Claus, and so I stopped under
+a bush that overhung the trail; and though I hated to destroy even a
+trifling part of the beauty around, I reached high up with my whip and
+let go at the branches, so that the moment before the horses bolted, the
+flakes showered down upon me and my robes and the cutter and changed me
+into a veritable snowman in snow white garb.
+
+And then up on the grade. One mile to the east, and the bridge appeared.
+
+It did not look like the work of man. Apart from its straight lines it
+resembled more the architecture of a forest brook as it will build after
+heavy fall rains followed by a late drought when all the waters of
+the wild are receding so that the icy cover stands above them like the
+arches of a bridge. It is strange how rarely the work of man will really
+harmonize with Nature. The beaver builds, and his work will blend. Man
+builds, and it jars--very likely because he mostly builds with silly
+pretensions. But in winter Nature breathes upon his handiwork and
+transforms it. Bridges may be imposing and of great artificial beauty in
+cities--as for instance the ancient structure that spans the Tiber
+just below the tomb of Hadrian, or among modern works the spider web
+engineering feat of Brooklyn bridge--but if in the wilderness we
+run across them, there is something incongruous about them, and
+they disturb. Strange to say, there is the exception of high-flung
+trellis-viaducts bridging the chasm of mountain canyons. Maybe it is
+exactly on account of their unpretentious, plain utility; or is it
+that they reconcile by their overweening boldness, by their very
+paradoxality--as there is beauty even in the hawk's bloodthirsty
+savagery. To-day this bridge was, like the grades, like the trees and
+the meadows furred over with opalescent, feathery frost.
+
+And the dam over which I am driving now! This dam that erstwhile was
+a very blasphemy, an obscenity flung on the marshy meadows with their
+reeds, their cat-tails, and their wide-leaved swamp-dock clusters! It
+had been used by the winds as a veritable dumping ground for obnoxious
+weeds which grew and thrived on the marly clay while every other plant
+despised it! Not that I mean to decry weeds--far be it from me. When the
+goldenrod flings its velvet cushions along the edge of the copses, or
+when the dandelion spangles the meadows, they are things of beauty
+as well as any tulip or tiger-lily. But when they or their rivals,
+silverweed, burdock, false ragweed, thistles, gumweed, and others usurp
+the landscape and seem to choke up the very earth and the very air with
+ceaseless monotony and repetition, then they become an offence to the
+eye and a reproach to those who tolerate them. To-day, however, they all
+lent their stalks to support the hoarfrost, to double and quadruple its
+total mass. They were powdered over with countless diamonds.
+
+It was here that I met with the flocks of snowflakes; and if my joyous
+mood had admitted of any enhancement, they would have given it.
+
+And never before had I seen the school and the cottage from quite so
+far! The haze was still there, but somehow it seemed to be further
+overhead now, with a stratum of winterclear air underneath. Once before,
+when driving along the first east-west grade, where I discovered the
+vista, I had wondered at the distance to which the eye could pierce.
+Here, on the dam, of course, my vision was further aided by the fact
+that whatever of trees and shrubs there was in the way--and a ridge of
+poplars ran at right angles to the ditch, throwing up a leafy curtain in
+summer--stood bare of its foliage. I was still nearly four miles from my
+"home" when I first beheld it. And how pitiably lonesome it looked! Not
+another house was to be seen in its neighbourhood. I touched the horses
+up with my whip. I felt as if I should fly across the distance and bring
+my presence to those in the cottage as their dearest gift. They knew I
+was coming. They were at this very moment flying to meet me with their
+thoughts. Was I well? Was I finding everything as I had wished to find
+it? And though I often told them how I loved and enjoyed my drives,
+they could not view them but with much anxiety, for they were waiting,
+waiting, waiting... Waiting on Thursday for Friday to come, waiting on
+Wednesday and Tuesday and Monday--waiting on Sunday even, as soon as I
+had left; counting the days, and the hours, and the minutes, till I was
+out, fighting storm and night to my heart's content! And then--worry,
+worry, worry--what might not happen! Whatever my drives were to me, to
+them they were horrors. There never were watchers of weather and sky so
+anxiously eager as they! And when, as it often, too often happened, the
+winter storms came, when care rose, hope fell, then eye was clouded,
+thought dulled, heart aflutter... Sometimes the soul sought comfort from
+nearest neighbours, and not always was it vouchsafed. "Well," they
+would say, "if he starts out to-day, he will kill his horses!"--or,
+"In weather like this I should not care to drive five miles!"--Surely,
+surely, I owe it to them, staunch, faithful hearts that they were, to
+set down this record so it may gladden the lonesome twilight hours that
+are sure to come...
+
+And at last I swung west again, up the ridge and on to the yard. And
+there on the porch stood the tall, young, smiling woman, and at her
+knee the fairest-haired girl in all the world. And quite unconscious of
+Nature's wonder-garb, though doubtlessly gladdened by it the little girl
+shrilled out, "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, did du see Santa Claus?" And I replied
+lustily, "Of course, my girl, I am coming straight from his palace."
+
+
+
+
+FOUR. Snow
+
+The blizzard started on Wednesday morning. It was that rather common,
+truly western combination of a heavy snowstorm with a blinding northern
+gale--such as piles the snow in hills and mountains and makes walking
+next to impossible.
+
+I cannot exactly say that I viewed it with unmingled joy. There were
+special reasons for that. It was the second week in January; when I had
+left "home" the Sunday before, I had been feeling rather bad; so my wife
+would worry a good deal, especially if I did not come at all. I knew
+there was such a thing as its becoming quite impossible to make
+the drive. I had been lost in a blizzard once or twice before in
+my lifetime. And yet, so long as there was the least chance that
+horse-power and human will-power combined might pull me through at all,
+I was determined to make or anyway to try it.
+
+At noon I heard the first dismal warning. For some reason or other I
+had to go down into the basement of the school. The janitor, a highly
+efficient but exceedingly bad-humoured cockney, who was dissatisfied
+with all things Canadian because "in the old country we do things
+differently"--whose sharp tongue was feared by many, and who once
+remarked to a lady teacher in the most casual way, "If you was a lidy,
+I'd wipe my boots on you!"--this selfsame janitor, standing by the
+furnace, turned slowly around, showed his pale and hollow-eyed face,
+and smiled a withering and commiserating smile. "Ye won't go north this
+week," he remarked--not without sympathy, for somehow he had taken
+a liking to me, which even prompted him off and on to favor me with
+caustic expressions of what he thought of the school board and the
+leading citizens of the town. I, of course, never encouraged him in his
+communicativeness which seemed to be just what he would expect, and no
+rebuff ever goaded him into the slightest show of resentment. "We'll
+see," I said briefly "Well, Sir," he repeated apodeictically, "ye
+won't." I smiled and went out.
+
+But in my classroom I looked from the window across the street. Not even
+in broad daylight could you see the opposite houses or trees. And I knew
+that, once a storm like that sets in, it is apt to continue for days at
+a stretch. It was one of those orgies in which Titan Wind indulges
+ever so often on our western prairies. I certainly needed something to
+encourage me, and so, before leaving the building, I went upstairs to
+the third story and looked through a window which faced north. But,
+though I was now above the drifting layer, I could not see very far
+here either; the snowflakes were small and like little round granules,
+hitting the panes of the windows with little sounds of "ping-ping";
+and they came, driven by a relentless gale, in such numbers that they
+blotted out whatever was more than two or three hundred yards away.
+
+The inhabitant of the middle latitudes of this continent has no data to
+picture to himself what a snowstorm in the north may be. To him snow is
+something benign that comes soft-footedly over night, and on the most
+silent wings like an owl, something that suggests the sleep of Nature
+rather than its battles. The further south you go, the more, of course,
+snow loses of its aggressive character.
+
+At the dinner table in the hotel I heard a few more disheartening words.
+But after four I defiantly got my tarpaulin out and carried it to the
+stable. If I had to run the risk of getting lost, at least I was going
+to prepare for it. I had once stayed out, snow-bound, for a day and a
+half, nearly without food and altogether without shelter; and I was not
+going to get thus caught again. I also carefully overhauled my cutter.
+Not a bolt but I tested it with a wrench; and before the stores were
+closed, I bought myself enough canned goods to feed me for a week should
+through any untoward accident the need arise. I always carried a little
+alcohol stove, and with my tarpaulin I could convert my cutter within
+three minutes into a windproof tent. Cramped quarters, to be sure, but
+better than being given over to the wind at thirty below!
+
+More than any remark on the part of friends or acquaintances one fact
+depressed me when I went home. There was not a team in town which had
+come in from the country. The streets were deserted: the stores were
+empty. The north wind and the snow had the town to themselves.
+
+On Thursday the weather was unchanged. On the way to the school I had to
+scale a snowdrift thrown up to a height of nearly six feet, and, though
+it was beginning to harden, from its own weight and the pressure of the
+wind, I still broke in at every step and found the task tiring in the
+extreme. I did my work, of course, as if nothing oppressed me, but in my
+heart I was beginning to face the possibility that, even if I tried,
+I might fail to reach my goal. The day passed by. At noon the
+school-children, the teachers, and a few people hurrying to the
+post-office for their mail lent a fleeting appearance of life to the
+streets. It nearly cheered me; but soon after four the whole town again
+took on that deserted look which reminded me of an abandoned mining
+camp. The lights in the store windows had something artificial
+about them, as if they were merely painted on the canvas-wings of a
+stage-setting. Not a team came in all day.
+
+On Friday morning the same. Burroughs would have said that the weather
+had gone into a rut. Still the wind whistled and howled through the
+bleak, dark, hollow dawn; the snow kept coming down and piling up, as
+if it could not be any otherwise. And as if to give notice of its
+intentions, the drift had completely closed up my front door. I fought
+my way to the school and thought things over. My wife and I had agreed,
+if ever the weather should be so bad that there was danger in going at
+night, I was to wait till Saturday morning and go by daylight. Neither
+one of us ever mentioned the possibility of giving the attempt up
+altogether. My wife probably understood that I would not bind myself by
+any such promise. Now even on this Friday I should have liked to go by
+night, if for no other reason, than for the experience's sake; but I
+reflected that I might get lost and not reach home at all. The horses
+knew the road--so long as there was any road; but there was none now.
+I felt it would not be fair to wife and child. So, reluctantly and with
+much hesitation, but definitely at last, I made up my mind that I was
+going to wait till morning. My cutter was ready--I had seen to that on
+Wednesday. As soon as the storm had set in, I had instinctively started
+to work in order to frustrate its designs.
+
+At noon I met in front of the post-office a charming lady who with her
+husband and a young Anglican curate constituted about the only circle of
+real friends I had in town. "Why!" I exclaimed, "what takes you out into
+this storm, Mrs. ----?" "The desire," she gasped against the wind and
+yet in her inimitable way, as if she were asking a favour, "to have
+you come to our house for tea, my friend. You surely are not going this
+week?" "I am going to go to-morrow morning at seven," I said. "But I
+shall be delighted to have tea with you and Mr. ----." I read her at
+a glance. She knew that in not going out at night I should suffer--she
+wished to help me over the evening, so I should not feel too much
+thwarted, too helpless, and too lonesome. She smiled. "You really want
+to go? But I must not keep you. At six, if you please." And we went our
+ways without a salute, for none was possible at this gale-swept corner.
+
+After four o'clock I took word to the stable to have my horses fed and
+harnessed by seven in the morning. The hostler had a tale to tell. "You
+going out north?" he enquired although he knew perfectly well I was. "Of
+course," I replied. "Well," he went on, "a man came in from ten miles
+out; he was half dead; come, look at his horses! He says, in places the
+snow is over the telephone posts." "I'll try it anyway," I said. "Just
+have the team ready I know what I can ask my horses to do. If it cannot
+be done, I shall turn back, that is all."
+
+When I stepped outside again, the wind seemed bent upon shaking the
+strongest faith. I went home to my house across the bridge and dressed.
+As soon as I was ready, I allowed myself to be swept past stable, past
+hotel and post-office till I reached the side street which led to the
+house where I was to be the guest.
+
+How sheltered, homelike and protected everything looked inside. The
+hostess, as usual, was radiantly amiable. The host settled back after
+supper to talk old country. The Channel Islands, the French Coast,
+Kent and London--those were from common knowledge our most frequently
+recurring topics. Both host and hostess, that was easy to see, were bent
+upon beguiling the hours of their rather dark-humored guest. But the
+howling gale outside was stronger than their good intentions. It was not
+very long before the conversation got around--reverted, so it seemed--to
+stories of storms, of being lost, of nearly freezing. The boys were
+sitting with wide and eager eyes, afraid they might be sent to bed
+before the feast of yarns was over. I told one or two of my most
+thrilling escapes, the host contributed a few more, and even the hostess
+had had an experience, driving on top of a railroad track for several
+miles, I believe, with a train, snowbound, behind her. I leaned over.
+"Mrs. ----," I said, "do not try to dissuade me. I am sorry to say it,
+but it is useless. I am bound to go." "Well," she said, "I wish you
+would not." "Thanks," I replied and looked at my watch. It was two
+o'clock. "There is only one thing wrong with coming to have tea in this
+home," I continued and smiled; "it is so hard to say good-bye."
+
+I carefully lighted my lantern and got into my wraps. The wind was
+howling dismally outside. For a moment we stood in the hall, shaking
+hands and paying the usual compliments; then one of the boys opened the
+door for me; and in stepping out I had one of the greatest surprises.
+Not far from the western edge of the world there stood the setting
+half-moon in a cloudless sky; myriads of stars were dusted over the
+vast, dark blue expanse, twinkling and blazing at their liveliest. And
+though the wind still whistled and shrieked and rattled, no snow came
+down, and not much seemed to drift. I pointed to the sky, smiled, nodded
+and closed the door. As far as the drifting of the snow went, I was
+mistaken, as I found out when I turned to the north, into the less
+sheltered street, past the post-office, hotel and stable. In front of
+a store I stopped to read a thermometer which I had found halfways
+reliable the year before. It read minus thirty-two degrees...
+
+It was still dark, of course, when I left the house on Saturday morning
+to be on my way. Also, it was cold, bitterly cold, but there was very
+little wind. In crossing the bridge which was swept nearly clean of snow
+I noticed a small, but somehow ominous-looking drift at the southern
+end. It had such a disturbed, lashed-up appearance. The snow was
+still loose, yet packed just hard enough to have a certain degree of
+toughness. You could no longer swing your foot through it: had you run
+into it at any great speed, you would have fallen; but as yet it was
+not hard enough to carry you. I knew that kind of a drift; it is
+treacherous. On a later drive one just like it, only built on a vastly
+larger scale, was to lead to the first of a series of little accidents
+which finally shattered my nerve. That was the only time that my
+temerity failed me. I shall tell you about that drive later on.
+
+At the stable I went about my preparations in a leisurely way. I knew
+that a supreme test was ahead of myself and the horses, and I meant to
+have daylight for tackling it. Once more I went over the most important
+bolts; once more I felt and pulled at every strap in the harness. I had
+a Clark footwarmer and made sure that it functioned properly I pulled
+the flaps of my military fur cap down over neck, ears and cheeks. I
+tucked a pillow under the sweater over my chest and made sure that my
+leggings clasped my furlined moccasins well. Then, to prevent my coat
+from opening even under the stress of motion, just before I got into the
+cutter, I tied a rope around my waist.
+
+The hostler brought the horses into the shed. They pawed the floor and
+snorted with impatience. While I rolled my robes about my legs and drew
+the canvas curtain over the front part of the box, I weighed Dan with my
+eyes. I had no fear for Peter, but Dan would have to show to-day that he
+deserved the way I had fed and nursed him. Like a chain, the strength
+of which is measured by the strength of its weakest link, my team was
+measured by Dan's pulling power and endurance. But he looked good to me
+as he danced across the pole and threw his head, biting back at Peter
+who was teasing him.
+
+The hostler was morose and in a biting mood. Every motion of his seemed
+to say, "What is the use of all this? No teamster would go out on a
+long drive in this weather, till the snow has settled down; and here a
+schoolmaster wants to try it."
+
+At last he pushed the slide doors aside, and we swung out. I held the
+horses tight and drove them into that little drift at the bridge to slow
+them down right from the start.
+
+The dawn was white, but with a strictly localised angry glow where the
+sun was still hidden below the horizon. In a very few minutes he would
+be up, and I counted on making that first mile just before he appeared.
+
+This mile is a wide, well levelled road, but ever so often, at intervals
+of maybe fifty to sixty yards, steep and long promontories of snow had
+been flung across--some of them five to six feet high. They started at
+the edge of the field to the left where a rank growth of shrubby weeds
+gave shelter for the snow to pile in. Their base, alongside the fence,
+was broad, and they tapered across the road, with a perfectly flat top,
+and with concave sides of a most delicate, smooth, and finished looking
+curve, till at last they ran out into a sharp point, mostly beyond the
+road on the field to the right.
+
+The wind plays strange pranks with snow; snow is the most plastic medium
+it has to mould into images and symbols of its moods. Here one of these
+promontories would slope down, and the very next one would slope upward
+as it advanced across the open space. In every case there had been
+two walls, as it were, of furious blow, and between the two a lane of
+comparative calm, caused by the shelter of a clump of brush or weeds, in
+which the snow had taken refuge from the wind's rough and savage play.
+Between these capes of snow there was an occasional bare patch of
+clean swept ground. Altogether there was an impression of barren, wild,
+bitter-cold windiness about the aspect that did not fail to awe my mind;
+it looked inhospitable, merciless, and cruelly playful.
+
+As yet the horses seemed to take only delight in dashing through the
+drifts, so that the powdery crystals flew aloft and dusted me all over.
+I peered across the field to the left, and a curious sight struck me.
+There was apparently no steady wind at all, but here and there, and
+every now and then a little whirl of snow would rise and fall again.
+Every one of them looked for all the world like a rabbit reconnoitring
+in deep grass. It jumps up on its hindlegs, while running, peers out,
+and settles down again. It was as if the snow meant to have a look
+at me, the interloper at such an early morning hour. The snow was so
+utterly dry that it obeyed the lightest breath; and whatever there was
+of motion in the air, could not amount to more than a cat's-paw's sudden
+reach.
+
+At the exact moment when the snow where it stood up highest became
+suffused with a rose-red tint from the rising sun, I arrived at the turn
+to the correction line. Had I been a novice at the work I was engaged
+in, the sight that met my eye might well have daunted me. Such drifts
+as I saw here should be broken by drivers who have short hauls to make
+before the long distance traveller attempts them. From the fence on the
+north side of the road a smoothly curved expanse covered the whole of
+the road allowance and gently sloped down into the field at my left. Its
+north edge stood like a cliff, the exact height of the fence, four feet
+I should say. In the centre it rose to probably six feet and then fell
+very gradually, whaleback fashion, to the south. Not one of the fence
+posts to the left was visible. The slow emergence of the tops of these
+fence posts became during the following week, when I drove out here
+daily, a measure for me of the settling down of the drift. I believe I
+can say from my observations that if no new snow falls or drifts in,
+and if no very considerable evaporation takes place, a newly piled
+snowdrift, undisturbed except by wind-pressure, will finally settle down
+to about from one third to one half of its original height, according
+to the pressure of the wind that was behind the snow when it first was
+thrown down. After it has, in this contracting process, reached two
+thirds of its first height, it can usually be relied upon to carry horse
+and man.
+
+The surface of this drift, which covered a ditch besides the grade and
+its grassy flanks, showed that curious appearance that we also find in
+the glaciated surfaces of granite rock and which, in them, geologists
+call exfoliation. In the case of rock it is the consequence of extreme
+changes in temperature. The surface sheet in expanding under sudden heat
+detaches itself in large, leaflike layers. In front of my wife's cottage
+up north there lay an exfoliated rock in which I watched the process for
+a number of years. In snow, of course, the origin of this appearance
+is entirely different; snow is laid down in layers by the waves in the
+wind. "Adfoliation" would be a more nearly correct appellation of the
+process. But from the analogy of the appearance I shall retain the more
+common word and call it exfoliation. Layers upon layers of paperlike
+sheets are superimposed upon each other, their edges often "cropping
+out" on sloping surfaces; and since these edges, according to the
+curvatures of the surfaces, run in wavy lines, the total aspect is very
+often that of "moire" silk.
+
+I knew the road as well as I had ever known a road. In summer there was
+a grassy expanse some thirty feet wide to the north; then followed the
+grade, flanked to the south by a ditch; and the tangle of weeds and
+small brush beyond reached right up to the other fence. I had to stay
+on or rather above the grade; so I stood up and selected the exact spot
+where to tackle it. Later, I knew, this drift would be harmless enough;
+there was sufficient local traffic here to establish a well-packed
+trail. At present, however, it still seemed a formidable task for a team
+that was to pull me over thirty-three miles more. Besides it was a first
+test for my horses; I did not know yet how they would behave in snow.
+
+But we went at it. For a moment things happened too fast for me to watch
+details. The horses plunged wildly and reared on their hind feet in
+a panic, straining against each other, pulling apart, going down
+underneath the pole, trying to turn and retrace their steps. And
+meanwhile the cutter went sharply up at first, as if on the crest of a
+wave, then toppled over into a hole made by Dan, and altogether behaved
+like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. Then order returned into the chaos.
+I had the lines short, wrapped double and treble around my wrists;
+my feet stood braced in the corner of the box, knees touching the
+dashboard; my robes slipped down. I spoke to the horses in a soft,
+quiet, purring voice; and at last I pulled in. Peter hated to stand.
+I held him. Then I looked back. This first wild plunge had taken us a
+matter of two hundred yards into the drift. Peter pulled and champed at
+the bit; the horses were sinking nearly out of sight. But I knew that
+many and many a time in the future I should have to go through just this
+and that from the beginning I must train the horses to tackle it right.
+So, in spite of my aching wrists I kept them standing till I thought
+that they were fully breathed. Then I relaxed my pull the slightest bit
+and clicked my tongue. "Good," I thought, "they are pulling together!"
+And I managed to hold them in line. They reared and plunged again like
+drowning things in their last agony, but they no longer clashed against
+nor pulled away from each other. I measured the distance with my eye.
+Another two hundred yards or thereabout, and I pulled them in again.
+Thus we stopped altogether four times. The horses were steaming when we
+got through this drift which was exactly half a mile long; my cutter was
+packed level full with slabs and clods of snow; and I was pretty well
+exhausted myself.
+
+"If there is very much of this," I thought for the moment, "I may not be
+able to make it." But then I knew that a north-south road will drift in
+badly only under exceptional circumstances. It is the east-west grades
+that are most apt to give trouble. Not that I minded my part of it, but
+I did not mean to kill my horses. I had sized them up in their behaviour
+towards snow. Peter, as I had expected, was excitable. It was hard to
+recognize in him just now, as he walked quietly along, the uproar of
+playing muscle and rearing limbs that he had been when we first struck
+the snow. That was well and good for a short, supreme effort; but not
+even for Peter would it do in the long, endless drifts which I had to
+expect. Dan was quieter, but he did not have Peter's staying power, in
+fact, he was not really a horse for the road. Strange, in spite of his
+usual keenness on the level road, he seemed to show more snow sense in
+the drift. This was to be amply confirmed in the future. Whenever an
+accident happened, it was Peter's fault. As you will see if you read on,
+Dan once lay quiet when Peter stood right on top of him.
+
+On this road north I found the same "promontories" that had been such
+a feature of the first one, flung across from the northwest to the
+southeast. Since the clumps of shrubs to the left were larger here, and
+more numerous, too, the drifts occasionally also were larger and higher;
+but not one of them was such that the horses could not clear it with one
+or two leaps. The sun was climbing, the air was winter-clear and still.
+None of the farms which I passed showed the slightest sign of life.
+I had wrapped up again and sat in comparative comfort and at ease,
+enjoying the clear sparkle and glitter of the virgin snow. It was not
+till considerably later that the real significance of the landscape
+dawned upon my consciousness. Still there was even now in my thoughts a
+speculative undertone. Subconsciously I wondered what might be ahead of
+me.
+
+We made Bell's corner in good time. The mile to the west proved easy.
+There were drifts, it is true, and the going was heavy, but at no place
+did the snow for any length of time reach higher than the horses' hocks.
+We turned to the north again, and here, for a while, the road was very
+good indeed; the underbrush to the left, on those expanses of wild
+land, had fettered, as it were, the feet of the wind. The snow was held
+everywhere, and very little of it had drifted. Only one spot I remember
+where a clump of Russian willow close to the trail had offered shelter
+enough to allow the wind to fill in the narrow road-gap to a depth of
+maybe eight or nine feet; but here it was easy to go around to the west.
+Without any further incident we reached the point where the useless,
+supernumerary fence post had caught my eye on my first trip out. I had
+made nearly eight miles now.
+
+But right here I was to get my first inkling of sights that might
+shatter my nerve. You may remember that a grove of tall poplars ran to
+the east, skirted along its southern edge by a road and a long line of
+telephone posts. Now here, in this shelter of the poplars, the snow from
+the more or less level and unsheltered spaces to the northwest had piled
+in indeed. It sloped up to the east; and never shall I forget what I
+beheld.
+
+The first of the posts stood a foot in snow; at the second one the drift
+reached six or seven feet up; the next one looked only half as long
+as the first one, and you might have imagined, standing as it did on a
+sloping hillside, that it had intentionally been made so much shorter
+than the others; but at the bottom of the visible part the wind, in
+sweeping around the pole, had scooped out a funnel-shaped crater which
+seemed to open into the very earth like a sinkhole. The next pole stood
+like a giant buried up to his chest and looked singularly helpless and
+footbound; and the last one I saw showed just its crossbar with three
+glassy, green insulators above the mountain of snow. The whole surface
+of this gigantic drift showed again that "exfoliated" appearance which I
+have described. Strange to say, this very exfoliation gave it
+something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so
+millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with
+particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the
+sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had
+challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort and
+the most fearless heart.
+
+So the hostler had not been fibbing after all!
+
+But not for a moment did I think of turning back. I am fatalistic in
+temperament. What is to be, is to be, that is not my outlook. If at last
+we should get bound up in a drift, well and good, I should then see what
+the next move would have to be. While the wind blows, snow drifts; while
+my horses could walk and I was not disabled, my road led north, not
+south. Like the snow I obeyed the laws of my nature. So far the road was
+good, and we swung along.
+
+Somewhere around here a field presented a curious view Its crop had not
+been harvested; it still stood in stooks. But from my side I saw nothing
+of the sheaves--it seemed to be flax, for here and there a flag of loose
+heads showed at the top. The snow had been blown up from all directions,
+so it looked, by the counter-currents that set up in the lee of every
+obstacle. These mounds presented one and all the appearance of cones
+or pyramids of butter patted into shape by upward strokes made with a
+spoon. There were the sharp ridges, irregular and erratic, and there
+were the hollows running up their flanks--exactly as such a cone of
+butter will show them. And the whole field was dotted with them, as if
+there were so many fresh graves.
+
+I made the twelve-mile bridge--passing through the cottonwood
+gate--reached the "hovel," and dropped into the wilderness again. Here
+the bigger trees stood strangely bare. Winter reveals the bark and the
+"habit" of trees. All ornaments and unessentials have been dropped. The
+naked skeletons show I remember how I was more than ever struck by that
+dappled appearance of the bark of the balm: an olive-green, yellowish
+hue, ridged and spotted with the black of ancient, overgrown leaf-scars;
+there was actually something gay about it; these poplars are certainly
+beautiful winter trees. The aspens were different. Although their stems
+stood white on white in the snow, that greenish tinge in their white
+gave them a curious look. From the picture that I carry about in my
+memory of this morning I cannot help the impression that they looked as
+if their white were not natural at all; they looked white-washed! I have
+often since confirmed this impression when there was snow on the ground.
+
+In the copses of saplings the zigzagging of the boles from twig to twig
+showed very distinctly, more so, I believe, than to me it had ever done
+before. How slender and straight they look in their summer garb--now
+they were stripped, and bone and sinew appeared.
+
+We came to the "half way farms," and the marsh lay ahead. I watered the
+horses, and I do not know what made me rest them for a little while,
+but I did. On the yard of the farm where I had turned in there was not
+a soul to be seen. Barns and stables were closed--and I noticed that
+the back door of the dwelling was buried tight by the snow. No doubt
+everybody preferred the neighbourhood of the fire to the cold outside.
+While stopping, I faced for the first time the sun. He was high in the
+sky by now--it was half-past ten--and it suddenly came home to me that
+there was something relentless, inexorable, cruel, yes, something of a
+sneer in the pitiless way in which he looked down on the infertile waste
+around. Unaccountably two Greek words formed on my lips: Homer's Pontos
+atrygetos--the barren sea. Half an hour later I was to realize the
+significance of it.
+
+I turned back to the road and north again. For another half mile the
+fields continued on either side; but somehow they seemed to take on a
+sinister look. There was more snow on them than I had found on the
+level land further south; the snow lay more smoothly, again under
+those "exfoliated" surface sheets which here, too, gave it an inhuman,
+primeval look; in the higher sun the vast expanse looked, I suppose,
+more blindingly white; and nowhere did buildings or thickets seem to
+emerge. Yet, so long as the grade continued, the going was fair enough.
+
+Then I came to the corner which marked half the distance, and there I
+stopped. Right in front, where the trail had been and where a ditch
+had divided off the marsh, a fortress of snow lay now: a seemingly
+impregnable bulwark, six or seven feet high, with rounded top, fitting
+descriptions which I had read of the underground bomb-proofs around
+Belgian strongholds--those forts which were hammered to pieces by the
+Germans in their first, heart-breaking forward surge in 1914. There
+was not a wrinkle in this inverted bowl. There it lay, smooth and
+slick--curled up in security, as it were, some twenty, thirty feet
+across; and behind it others, and more of them to the right and to the
+left. This had been a stretch, covered with brush and bush, willow and
+poplar thickets; but my eye saw nothing except a mammiferous waste,
+cruelly white, glittering in the heatless, chuckling sun, and scoffing
+at me, the intruder. I stood up again and peered out. To the east it
+seemed as if these buttes of snow were a trifle lower; but maybe the
+ground underneath also sloped down. I wished I had travelled here more
+often by daytime, so I might know. As it was, there was nothing to it; I
+had to tackle the task. And we plunged in.
+
+I had learned something from my first experience in the drift one mile
+north of town, and I kept my horses well under control. Still, it was a
+wild enough dash. Peter lost his footing two or three times and worked
+himself into a mild panic. But Dan--I could not help admiring the way
+in which, buried over his back in snow, he would slowly and deliberately
+rear on his hindfeet and take his bound. For fully five minutes I never
+saw anything of the horses except their heads. I inferred their motions
+from the dusting snowcloud that rose above their bodies and settled
+on myself. And then somehow we emerged. We reached a stretch of ground
+where the snow was just high enough to cover the hocks of the horses. It
+was a hollow scooped out by some freak of the wind. I pulled in, and the
+horses stood panting. Peter no longer showed any desire to fret and to
+jump. Both horses apparently felt the wisdom of sparing their strength.
+They were all white with the frost of their sweat and the spray of the
+snow...
+
+While I gave them their time, I looked around, and here a lesson came
+home to me. In the hollow where we stood, the snow did not lie smoothly.
+A huge obstacle to the northwest, probably a buried clump of brush, had
+made the wind turn back upon itself, first downward, then, at the bottom
+of the pit, in a direction opposite to that of the main current above,
+and finally slantways upward again to the summit of the obstacle, where
+it rejoined the parent blow. The floor of the hollow was cleanly
+scooped out and chiselled in low ridges; and these ridges came from the
+southeast, running their points to the northwest. I learned to look out
+for this sign, and I verily believe that, had I not learned that lesson
+right now, I should never have reached the creek which was still four or
+five miles distant.
+
+The huge mound in the lee of which I was stopping was a matter of two
+hundred yards away; nearer to it the snow was considerably deeper;
+and since it presented an appearance very characteristic of Prairie
+bush-drifts, I shall describe it in some detail. Apparently the winds
+had first bent over all the stems of the clump; for whenever I saw one
+of them from the north, it showed a smooth, clean upward sweep. On the
+south side the snow first fell in a sheer cliff; then there was a hollow
+which was partly filled by a talus-shaped drift thrown in by the counter
+currents from the southern pit in which we were stopping; the sides of
+this talus again showed the marks that reminded of those left by the
+spoon when butter is roughly stroked into the shape of a pyramid. The
+interesting parts of the structure consisted in the beetling brow of the
+cliff and the roof of the cavity underneath. The brow had a honeycombed
+appearance; the snow had been laid down in layers of varying density (I
+shall discuss this more fully in the next chapter when we are going
+to look in on the snow while it is actually at work); and the counter
+currents that here swept upward in a slanting direction had bitten
+out the softer layers, leaving a fine network of little ridges which
+reminded strangely of the delicate fretwork-tracery in wind-sculptured
+rock--as I had seen it in the Black Hills in South Dakota. This piece of
+work of the wind is exceedingly short-lived in snow, and it must not be
+confounded with the honeycombed appearance of those faces of snow cliffs
+which are "rotting" by reason of their exposure to the heat of the
+noonday sun. These latter are coarse, often dirty, and nearly always
+have something bristling about them which is entirely absent in the
+sculptures of the wind. The under side of the roof in the cavity looked
+very much as a very stiff or viscid treacle would look when spread over
+a meshy surface, as, for instance, over a closely woven netting of wire.
+The stems and the branches of the brush took the place of the wire, and
+in their meshes the snow had been pressed through by its own weight, but
+held together by its curious ductility or tensile strength of which I
+was to find further evidence soon enough. It thus formed innumerable,
+blunted little stalactites, but without the corresponding stalagmites
+which you find in limestone caves or on the north side of buildings when
+the snow from the roof thaws and forms icicles and slender cones of ice
+growing up to meet them from the ground where the trickling drops fall
+and freeze again.
+
+By the help of these various tokens I had picked my next resting place
+before we started up again. It was on this second dash that I understood
+why those Homeric words had come to my lips a while ago. This was indeed
+like nothing so much as like being out on rough waters and in a troubled
+sea, with nothing to brace the storm with but a wind-tossed nutshell
+of a one-man sailing craft. I knew that experience for having outridden
+many a gale in the mouth of the mighty St. Lawrence River. When the snow
+reached its extreme in depth, it gave you the feeling which a drowning
+man may have when fighting his desperate fight with the salty waves. But
+more impressive than that was the frequent outer resemblance. The waves
+of the ocean rise up and reach out and batter against the rocks and
+battlements of the shore, retreating again and ever returning to the
+assault, covering the obstacles thrown in the way of their progress with
+thin sheets of licking tongues at least. And if such a high crest wave
+had suddenly been frozen into solidity, its outline would have mimicked
+to perfection many a one of the snow shapes that I saw around.
+
+Once the horses had really learned to pull exactly together--and they
+learned it thoroughly here--our progress was not too bad. Of course, it
+was not like going on a grade, be it ever so badly drifted in. Here
+the ground underneath, too, was uneven and overgrown with a veritable
+entanglement of brush in which often the horses' feet would get caught.
+As for the road, there was none left, nothing that even by the boldest
+stretch of imagination could have been considered even as the slightest
+indication of one. And worst of all, I knew positively that there would
+be no trail at any time during the winter. I was well aware of the fact
+that, after it once snowed up, nobody ever crossed this waste between
+the "half way farms" and the "White Range Line House." This morning it
+took me two and a half solid hours to make four miles.
+
+But the ordeal had its reward. Here where the fact that there was snow
+on the ground, and plenty of it, did no longer need to be sunk into my
+brain--as soon as it had lost its value as a piece of news and a lesson,
+I began to enjoy it just as the hunter in India will enjoy the battle of
+wits when he is pitted against a yellow-black tiger. I began to catch on
+to the ways of this snow; I began, as it were, to study the mentality of
+my enemy. Though I never kill, I am after all something of a sportsman.
+And still another thing gave me back that mental equilibrium which you
+need in order to see things and to reason calmly about them. Every dash
+of two hundred yards or so brought me that much nearer to my goal. Up to
+the "half way farms" I had, as it were, been working uphill: there was
+more ahead than behind. This was now reversed: there was more behind
+than ahead, and as yet I did not worry about the return trip.
+
+Now I have already said that snow is the only really plastic element in
+which the wind can carve the vagaries of its mood and leave a record of
+at least some permanency. The surface of the sea is a wonderful book to
+be read with a lightning-quick eye; I do not know anything better to
+do as a cure for ragged nerves--provided you are a good sailor. But the
+forms are too fleeting, they change too quickly--so quickly, indeed,
+that I have never succeeded in so fixing their record upon my memory as
+to be able to develop one form from the other in descriptive notes. It
+is that very fact, I believe, upon which hinges the curative value of
+the sight: you are so completely absorbed by the moment, and all other
+things fall away. Many and many a day have I lain in my deck chair on
+board a liner and watched the play of the waves; but the pleasure,
+which was very great indeed, was momentary; and sometimes, when in
+an unsympathetic mood, I have since impatiently wondered in what that
+fascination may have consisted. It was different here. Snow is very
+nearly as yielding as water and, once it fully responds in its surface
+to the carving forces of the wind, it stays--as if frozen into the
+glittering marble image of its motion. I know few things that are as
+truly fascinating as the sculptures of the wind in snow; for here you
+have time and opportunity a-plenty to probe not only into the what,
+but also into the why. Maybe that one day I shall write down a fuller
+account of my observations. In this report I shall have to restrict
+myself to a few indications, for this is not the record of the whims of
+the wind, but merely the narrative of my drives.
+
+In places, for instance, the rounded, "bomb-proof" aspect of the
+expanses would be changed into the distinct contour of gigantic waves
+with a very fine, very sharp crest-line. The upsweep from the northwest
+would be ever so slightly convex, and the downward sweep into the trough
+was always very distinctly concave. This was not the ripple which we
+find in beach sand. That ripple was there, too, and in places it covered
+the wide backs of these huge waves all over; but never was it found on
+the concave side. Occasionally, but rarely, one of these great waves
+would resemble a large breaker with a curly crest. Here the onward sweep
+from the northwest had built the snow out, beyond the supporting base,
+into a thick overhanging ledge which here and there had sagged; but
+by virtue of that tensile strength and cohesion in snow which I have
+mentioned already, it still held together and now looked convoluted and
+ruffled in the most deceiving way. I believe I actually listened for the
+muffled roar which the breaker makes when its subaqueous part begins to
+sweep the upward sloping beach. To make this illusion complete, or to
+break it by the very absurdity and exaggeration of a comparison drawn
+out too far--I do not know which--there would, every now and then,
+from the crest of one of these waves, jut out something which closely
+resembled the wide back of a large fish diving down into the concave
+side towards the trough. This looked very much like porpoises or
+dolphins jumping in a heaving sea; only that in my memory picture the
+real dolphins always jump in the opposite direction, against the run of
+the waves, bridging the trough.
+
+In other places a fine, exceedingly delicate crest-line would spring up
+from the high point of some buried obstacle and sweep along in the most
+graceful curve as far as the eye would carry I particularly remember one
+of them, and I could discover no earthly reason for the curvature in it.
+
+Again there would be a triangular--or should I say
+"tetrahedral"?--up-sweep from the direction of the wind, ending in a
+sharp, perfectly plane down-sweep on the south side; and the point of
+this three-sided but oblique pyramid would hang over like the flap of
+a tam. There was something of the consistency of very thick cloth about
+this overhanging flap.
+
+Or an up-slope from the north would end in a long, nearly perpendicular
+cliff-line facing south. And the talus formation which I have mentioned
+would be perfectly smooth; but it did not reach quite to the top of the
+cliff, maybe to within a foot of it. The upsloping layer from the north
+would hang out again, with an even brow; but between this smooth cornice
+and the upper edge of the talus the snow looked as if it had been
+squeezed out by tremendous pressure from above, like an exceedingly
+viscid liquid--cooling glue, for instance, which is being squeezed out
+from between the core and the veneer in a veneering press.
+
+Once I passed close to and south of, two thickets which were completely
+buried by the snow. Between them a ditch had been scooped out in a very
+curious fashion. It resembled exactly a winding river bed with its water
+drained off; it was two or three feet deep, and wherever it turned, its
+banks were undermined on the "throw" side by the "wash" of the furious
+blow. The analogy between the work of the wind and the work of flowing
+water constantly obtrudes, especially where this work is one of
+"erosion."
+
+But as flowing water will swing up and down in the most surprising forms
+where the bed of the river is rough with rocks and throws it into choppy
+waves which do not seem to move, so the snow was thrown up into the most
+curious forms where the frozen swamp ground underneath had bubbled,
+as it were, into phantastic shapes. I remember several places where
+a perfect circle was formed by a sharp crestline that bounded an
+hemispherical, crater-like hollow. When steam bubbles up through thick
+porridge, in its leisurely and impeded way, and the bubble bursts with
+a clucking sound, then for a moment a crater is formed just like these
+circular holes; only here in the snow they were on a much larger scale,
+of course, some of them six to ten feet in diameter.
+
+And again the snow was thrown up into a bulwark, twenty and more feet
+high, with that always repeating cliff face to the south, resembling a
+miniature Gibraltar, with many smaller ones of most curiously similar
+form on its back: bulwarks upon bulwarks, all lowering to the south. In
+these the aggressive nature of storm-flung snow was most apparent. They
+were formidable structures; formidable and intimidating, more through
+the suggestiveness of their shape than through mere size.
+
+I came to places where the wind had had its moments of frolicksome
+humour, where it had made grim fun of its own massive and cumbersome
+and yet so pliable and elastic majesty. It had turned around and around,
+running with breathless speed, with its tongue lolling out, as it were,
+and probably yapping and snapping in mocking mimicry of a pup trying to
+catch its tail; and it had scooped out a spiral trough with overhanging
+rim. I felt sorry that I had not been there to watch it, because after
+all, what I saw, was only the dead record of something that had been
+very much alive and vociferatingly noisy. And in another place it had
+reared and raised its head like a boa constrictor, ready to strike at
+its prey; up to the flashing, forked tongue it was there. But one spot
+I remember, where it looked exactly as if quite consciously it had
+attempted the outright ludicrous: it had thrown up the snow into the
+semblance of some formidable animal--more like a gorilla than anything
+else it looked, a gorilla that stands on its four hands and raises every
+hair on its back and snarls in order to frighten that which it is afraid
+of itself--a leopard maybe.
+
+And then I reached the "White Range Line House." Curiously enough, there
+it stood, sheltered by its majestic bluff to the north, as peaceful
+looking as if there were no such a thing as that record, which I had
+crossed, of the uproar and fury of one of the forces of Nature engaged
+in an orgy. And it looked so empty, too, and so deserted, with never
+a wisp of smoke curling from its flue-pipe, that for a moment I was
+tempted to turn in and see whether maybe the lonely dweller was ill. But
+then I felt as if I could not be burdened with any stranger's worries
+that day.
+
+The effective shelter of the poplar forest along the creek made itself
+felt. The last mile to the northeast was peaceful driving. I felt quite
+cheered, though I walked the horses over the whole of the mile since
+both began to show signs of wear. The last four miles had been a test
+to try any living creature's mettle. To me it had been one of the
+culminating points in that glorious winter, but the horses had lacked
+the mental stimulus, and even I felt rather exhausted.
+
+On the bridge I stopped, threw the blankets over the horses, and fed.
+Somehow this seemed to be the best place to do it. There was no snow
+to speak of, and I did not know yet what might follow. The horses were
+drooping, and I gave them an additional ten minutes' rest. Then I slowly
+made ready. I did not really expect any serious trouble.
+
+We turned at a walk, and the chasm of the bush road opened up.
+Instantly I pulled the horses in. What I saw, baffled me for a moment
+so completely that I just sat there and gasped. There was no road. The
+trees to both sides were not so overly high, but the snow had piled in
+level with their tops; the drift looked like a gigantic barricade. It
+was that fleeting sight of the telephone posts over again, though on a
+slightly smaller scale; but this time it was in front. Slowly I started
+to whistle and then looked around. I remembered now. There was a newly
+cut-out road running north past the school which lay embedded in the
+bush. It had offered a lane to the wind; and the wind, going there, in
+cramped space, at a doubly furious stride, had picked up and carried
+along all the loose snow from the grassy glades in its path. The road
+ended abruptly just north of the drift, where the east-west grade sprang
+up. When the wind had reached this end of the lane, where the bush ran
+at right angles to its direction, it had found itself in something
+like a blind alley, and, sweeping upward, to clear the obstacle, it had
+dropped every bit of its load into the shelter of the brush, gradually,
+in the course of three long days, building up a ridge that buried
+underbrush and trees. I might have known it, of course. I knew enough
+about snow; all the conditions for an exceptionally large drift were
+provided for here. But it had not occurred to me, especially after I had
+found the northern fringe of the marsh so well sheltered. Here I felt
+for a moment as if all the snow of the universe had piled in. As I said,
+I was so completely baffled that I could have turned the horses then and
+there.
+
+But after a minute or two my eyes began to cast about. I turned to the
+south, right into the dense underbrush and towards the creek which
+here swept south in a long, flat curve. Peter was always intolerant
+of anything that moved underfoot. He started to bolt when the dry and
+hard-frozen stems snapped and broke with reports resembling pistol
+shots. But since Dan kept quiet, I held Peter well in hand. I went along
+the drift for maybe three to four hundred yards, reconnoitring. Then the
+trees began to stand too dense for me to proceed without endangering my
+cutter. Just beyond I saw the big trough of the creek bed, and though
+I could not make out how conditions were at its bottom, the drift
+continued on its southern bank, and in any case it was impossible to
+cross the hollow. So I turned; I had made up my mind to try the drift.
+
+About a hundred and fifty yards from the point where I had turned off
+the road there was something like a fold in the flank of the drift. At
+its foot I stopped. For a moment I tried to explain that fold to myself.
+This is what I arrived at. North of the drift, just about where the new
+cut-out joined the east-west grade, there was a small clearing caused
+by a bush fire which a few years ago had penetrated thus far into this
+otherwise virgin corner of the forest. Unfortunately it stood so full of
+charred stumps that it was impossible to get through there. But the main
+currents of the wind would have free play in this opening, and I knew
+that, when the blizzard began, it had been blowing from a more northerly
+quarter than later on, when it veered to the northwest. And though the
+snow came careering along the lane of the cut-out, that is, from due
+north, its "throw" and therefore, the direction of the drift would be
+determined by the direction of the wind that took charge of it on this
+clearing. Probably, then, a first, provisional drift whose long axis lay
+nearly in a north-south line, had been piled up by the first, northerly
+gale. Later a second, larger drift had been superimposed upon it at an
+angle, with its main axis running from the northwest to the southeast.
+The fold marked the point where the first, smaller drift still emerged
+from the second larger one. This reasoning was confirmed by a study of
+the clearing itself which I came to make two or three weeks after.
+
+Before I called on the horses to give me their very last ounce of
+strength, I got out of my cutter once more and made sure that my lines
+were still sound. I trusted my ability to guide the horses even in this
+crucial test, but I dreaded nothing so much as that the lines might
+break; and I wanted to guard against any accident. I should mention
+that, of course, the top of my cutter was down, that the traces of the
+harness were new, and that the cutter itself during its previous trials
+had shown an exceptional stability. Once more I thus rested my horses
+for five minutes; and they seemed to realize what was coming. Their
+heads were up, their ears were cocked. When I got back into my cutter,
+I carefully brushed the snow from moccasins and trousers, laid the robe
+around my feet, adjusted my knees against the dashboard, and tied two
+big loops into the lines to hold them by.
+
+Then I clicked my tongue. The horses bounded upward in unison. For a
+moment it looked as if they intended to work through, instead of over,
+the drift. A wild shower of angular snow-slabs swept in upon me.
+The cutter reared up and plunged and reared again--and then the view
+cleared. The snow proved harder than I had anticipated--which bespoke
+the fury of the blow that had piled it. It did not carry the horses, but
+neither--once we had reached a height of five or six feet--did they sink
+beyond their bellies and out of sight. I had no eye for anything except
+them. What lay to right or left, seemed not to concern me. I watched
+them work. They went in bounds, working beautifully together.
+Rhythmically they reared, and rhythmically they plunged. I had dropped
+back to the seat, holding them with a firm hand, feet braced against the
+dashboard; and whenever they got ready to rear, I called to them in a
+low and quiet voice, "Peter--Dan--now!" And their muscles played with
+the effort of desperation. It probably did not take more than five
+minutes, maybe considerably less, before we had reached the top, but to
+me it seemed like hours of nearly fruitless endeavour. I did not realize
+at first that we were high. I shall never forget the weird kind of
+astonishment when the fact came home to me that what snapped and
+crackled in the snow under the horses' hoofs, were the tops of trees.
+Nor shall the feeling of estrangement, as it were--as if I were not
+myself, but looking on from the outside at the adventure of somebody
+who yet was I--the feeling of other-worldliness, if you will pardon the
+word, ever fade from my memory--a feeling of having been carried beyond
+my depth where I could not swim--which came over me when with two quick
+glances to right and left I took in the fact that there were no longer
+any trees to either side, that I was above that forest world which had
+so often engulfed me.
+
+Then I drew my lines in. The horses fought against it, did not want to
+stand. But I had to find my way, and while they were going, I could not
+take my eyes from them. It took a supreme effort on my part to make them
+obey. At last they stood, but I had to hold them with all my strength,
+and with not a second's respite. Now that I was on top of the drift,
+the problem of how to get down loomed larger than that of getting up had
+seemed before. I knew I did not have half a minute in which to decide
+upon my course; for it became increasingly difficult to hold the horses
+back, and they were fast sinking away.
+
+During this short breathing spell I took in the situation. We had come
+up in a northeast direction, slanting along the slope. Once on top, I
+had instinctively turned to the north. Here the drift was about twenty
+feet wide, perfectly level and with an exfoliated surface layer. To the
+east the drift fell steeply, with a clean, smooth cliff-line marking
+off the beginning of the descent; this line seemed particularly
+disconcerting, for it betrayed the concave curvature of the down-sweep.
+A few yards to the north I saw below, at the foot of the cliff, the old
+logging-trail, and I noticed that the snow on it lay as it had fallen,
+smooth and sheer, without a ripple of a drift. It looked like mockery.
+And yet that was where I had to get down.
+
+The next few minutes are rather a maze in my memory. But two pictures
+were photographed with great distinctness. The one is of the moment when
+we went over the edge. For a second Peter reared up, pawing the air with
+his forefeet; Dan tried to back away from the empty fall. I had at this
+excruciating point no purchase whatever on the lines. Then apparently
+Peter sat or fell down, I do not know which, on his haunches and began
+to slide. The cutter lurched to the left as if it were going to spill
+all it held. Dan was knocked off his hind feet by the drawbar--and
+we plunged... We came to with a terrific jolt that sent me in a
+heap against the dashboard. One jump, and I stood on the ground. The
+cutter--and this is the second picture which is etched clearly on the
+plate of my memory--stood on its pole, leaning at an angle of forty-five
+degrees against the drift. The horses were as if stunned. "Dan, Peter!"
+I shouted, and they struggled to their feet. They were badly winded, but
+otherwise everything seemed all right. I looked wistfully back and up at
+the gully which we had torn into the flank of the drift.
+
+I should gladly have breathed the horses again, but they were hot, the
+air was at zero or colder, the rays of the sun had begun to slant. I
+walked for a while alongside the team. They were drooping sadly. Then
+I got in again, driving them slowly till we came to the crossing of the
+ditch. I had no eye for the grade ahead. On the bush road the going was
+good--now and then a small drift, but nothing alarming anywhere. The
+anti-climax had set in. Again the speckled trunks of the balm poplars
+struck my eye, now interspersed with the scarlet stems of the red osier
+dogwood. But they failed to cheer me--they were mere facts, unable to
+stir moods...
+
+I began to think. A few weeks ago I had met that American settler with
+the French sounding name who lived alongside the angling dam further
+north. We had talked snow, and he had said, "Oh, up here it never is bad
+except along this grade,"--we were stopping on the last east-west grade,
+the one I was coming to--"there you cannot get through. You'd kill your
+horses. Level with the tree-tops." Well, I had had just that a little
+while ago--I could not afford any more of it. So I made up my mind to
+try a new trail, across a section which was fenced. It meant getting
+out of my robes twice more, to open the gates, but I preferred that
+to another tree-high drift. To spare my horses was now my only
+consideration. I should not have liked to take the new trail by night,
+for fear of missing the gates; but that objection did not hold just now.
+Horses and I were pretty well spent. So, instead of forking off the main
+trail to the north we went straight ahead.
+
+In due time I came to the bridge which I had to cross in order to get
+up on the dam. Here I saw--in an absent-minded, half unconscious, and
+uninterested way--one more structure built by architect wind. The deep
+master ditch from the north emptied here, to the left of the bridge,
+into the grade ditch which ran east and west. And at the corner the snow
+had very nearly bridged it--so nearly that you could easily have stepped
+across the remaining gap. But below it was hollow--nothing supported
+the bridge--it was a mere arch, with a vault underneath that looked
+temptingly sheltered and cosy to wearied eyes.
+
+The dam was bare, and I had to pull off to the east, on to the swampy
+plain. I gave my horses the lines, and slowly, slowly they took me home!
+Even had I not always lost interest here, to-day I should have leaned
+back and rested. Although the horses had done all the actual work, the
+strain of it had been largely on me. It was the after-effect that set in
+now.
+
+I thought of my wife, and of how she would have felt had she been
+able to follow the scenes in some magical mirror through every single
+vicissitude of my drive. And once more I saw with the eye of recent
+memory the horses in that long, endless plunge through the corner of the
+marsh. Once more I felt my muscles a-quiver with the strain of that last
+wild struggle over that last, inhuman drift. And slowly I made up my
+mind that the next time, the very next day, on my return trip, I was
+going to add another eleven miles to my already long drive and to take a
+different road. I knew the trail over which I had been coming so far was
+closed for the rest of the winter--there was no traffic there--no trail
+would be kept open. That other road of which I was thinking and which
+lay further west was the main cordwood trail to the towns in the south.
+It was out of my way, to be sure, but I felt convinced that I could
+spare my horses and even save time by making the detour.
+
+Being on the east side of the dam, I could not see school or cottage
+till I turned up on the correction line. But when at last I saw it, I
+felt somewhat as I had felt coming home from my first big trip overseas.
+It seemed a lifetime since I had started out. I seemed to be a different
+man.
+
+Here, in the timber land, the snow had not drifted to any extent.
+There were signs of the gale, but its record was written in fallen tree
+trunks, broken branches, a litter of twigs--not in drifts of snow. My
+wife would not surmise what I had gone through.
+
+She came out with a smile on her face when I pulled in on the yard. It
+was characteristic of her that she did not ask why I came so late; she
+accepted the fact as something for which there were no doubt compelling
+reasons. "I was giving our girl a bath," she said; "she cannot come."
+And then she looked wistfully at my face and at the horses. Silently
+I slipped the harness off their backs. I used to let them have their
+freedom for a while on reaching home. And never yet but Peter at least
+had had a kick and a caper and a roll before they sought their mangers.
+To-day they stood for a moment knock-kneed, without moving, then shook
+themselves in a weak, half-hearted way and went with drooping heads and
+weary limbs straight to the stable.
+
+"You had a hard trip?" asked my wife; and I replied with as much cheer
+as I could muster, "I have seen sights to-day that I did not expect to
+see before my dying day." And taking her arm, I looked at the westering
+sun and turned towards the house.
+
+
+
+
+FIVE. Wind and Waves
+
+When I awoke on the morning after the last described arrival at "home,"
+I thought of the angry glow in the east at sunrise of the day before.
+It had been cold again over night, so cold that in the small cottage,
+whatever was capable of freezing, froze to its very core. The frost had
+even penetrated the hole which in this "teacher's residence" made shift
+for a cellar, and, in spite of their being covered with layer upon layer
+of empty bags, had sweetened the winter's supply of potatoes.
+
+But towards morning there had been a let-up, a sudden rise in
+temperature, as we experience it so often, coincident with a change in
+the direction of the wind, which now blew rather briskly from the south,
+foreboding a storm.
+
+I got the horses ready at an early hour, for I was going to try the
+roundabout way at last, forty-five miles of it; and never before had I
+gone over the whole of it in winter. Even in summer I had done so only
+once, and that in a car, when I had accompanied the school-inspector on
+one of his trips. I wanted to make sure that I should be ready in time
+to start at ten o'clock in the morning.
+
+This new road had chiefly two features which recommended it to me.
+Firstly, about thirty-eight miles out of forty-five led through a fairly
+well settled district where I could hope to find a chain of short-haul
+trails. The widest gap in this series of settlements was one of two
+miles where there was wild land. The remaining seven miles, it is true,
+led across that wilderness on the east side of which lay Bell's farm.
+This piece, however, I knew so well that I felt sure of finding my
+way there by night or day in any reasonable kind of weather. Nor did I
+expect to find it badly drifted. And secondly, about twenty-nine miles
+from "home" I should pass within one mile of a town which boasted
+of boarding house and livery stable, offering thus, in case of an
+emergency, a convenient stopping place.
+
+I watched the sky rather anxiously, not so much on my own account as
+because my wife, seeing me start, would worry a good deal should that
+start be made in foul weather. At nine the sky began to get grey in
+spots. Shortly after a big cloud came sailing up, and I went out to
+watch it. And sure enough, it had that altogether loose appearance, with
+those wind-torn, cottony appendages hanging down from its darker upper
+body which are sure to bring snow. Lower away in the south--a rare thing
+to come from the south in our climate--there lay a black squall-cloud
+with a rounded outline, like a big windbag, resembling nothing so much
+as a fat boy's face with its cheeks blown out, when he tries to fill a
+football with the pressure from his lungs. That was an infallible sign.
+The first cloud, which was travelling fast, might blow over. The second,
+larger one was sure to bring wind a-plenty. But still there was hope. So
+long as it did not bring outright snow, my wife would not worry so much.
+Here where she was, the snow would not drift--there was altogether
+too much bush. She--not having been much of an observer of the skies
+before--dreaded the snowstorm more than the blizzard. I knew the latter
+was what portended danger.
+
+When I turned back into the house, a new thought struck me. I spoke to
+my wife, who was putting up a lunch for me, and proposed to take her and
+our little girl over to a neighbour's place a mile and a half west of
+the school. Those people were among the very few who had been decent to
+her, and the visit would beguile the weary Sunday afternoon. She agreed
+at once. So we all got ready; I brought the horses out and hooked them
+up, alone--no trouble from them this morning: they were quiet enough
+when they drank deep at the well.
+
+A few whirls of snow had come down meanwhile--not enough, however, as
+yet to show as a new layer on the older snow. Again a cloud had torn
+loose from that squall-bag on the horizon, and again it showed that
+cottony, fringy, whitish under layer which meant snow. I raised the top
+of the cutter and fastened the curtains.
+
+By the time we three piled in, the thin flakes were dancing all around
+again, dusting our furs with their thin, glittering crystals. I bandied
+baby-talk with the little girl to make things look cheerful, but there
+was anguish in the young woman's look. I saw she would like to ask me to
+stay over till Monday, but she knew that I considered it my duty to get
+back to town by night.
+
+The short drive to the neighbour's place was pleasant enough. There was
+plenty of snow on this part of the correction line, which farther east
+was bare; and it was packed down by abundant traffic. Then came the
+parting. I kissed wife and child; and slowly, accompanied by much waving
+of hands on the part of the little girl and a rather depressed looking
+smile on that of my wife, I turned on the yard and swung back to the
+road. The cliffs of black poplar boles engulfed me at once: a sheltered
+grade.
+
+But I had not yet gone very far--a mile perhaps, or a little over--when
+the trees began to bend under the impact of that squall. Nearly at the
+same moment the sun, which so far had been shining in an intermittent
+way, was blotted from the sky, and it turned almost dusky. For a long
+while--for more than an hour, indeed--it had seemed as if that black
+squall-cloud were lying motionless at the horizon--an anchored ship,
+bulging at its wharf. But then, as if its moorings had been cast off, or
+its sails unfurled, it travelled up with amazing speed. The wind had an
+easterly slant to it--a rare thing with us for a wind from that quarter
+to bring a heavy storm. The gale had hardly been blowing for ten or
+fifteen minutes, when the snow began to whirl down. It came in the
+tiniest possible flakes, consisting this time of short needles that
+looked like miniature spindles, strung with the smallest imaginable
+globules of ice--no six-armed crystals that I could find so far. Many a
+snowstorm begins that way with us. And there was even here, in the chasm
+of the road, a swing and dance to the flakes that bespoke the force of
+the wind above.
+
+My total direction--after I should have turned off the correction
+line--lay to the southeast; into the very teeth of the wind. I had to
+make it by laps though, first south, then east, then south again, with
+the exception of six or seven miles across the wild land west of Bell's
+corner; there, as nearly as I could hold the direction, I should have to
+strike a true line southeast.
+
+I timed my horses; I could not possibly urge them on to-day. They took
+about nine minutes to the mile, and I knew I should have to give them
+many a walk. That meant at best a drive of eight hours. It would be dark
+before I reached town. I did not mind that, for I knew there would be
+many a night drive ahead, and I felt sure that that half-mile on the
+southern correction line, one mile from town, would have been gone
+over on Saturday by quite a number of teams. The snow settles down
+considerably, too, in thirty hours, especially under the pressure of
+wind. If a trail had been made over the drift, I was confident my horses
+would find it without fail. So I dismissed all anxiety on my own score.
+
+But all the more did the thought of my wife worry me. If only I could
+have made her see things with my own eyes--but I could not. She regarded
+me as an invalid whose health was undermined by a wasting illness and
+who needed nursing and coddling on the slightest provocation. Instead of
+drawing Nature's inference that, what cannot live, should die, she clung
+to the slender thread of life that sometimes threatened to break--but
+never on these drives. I often told her that, if I could make my
+living by driving instead of teaching, I should feel the stronger,
+the healthier, and the better for it--my main problem would have been
+solved. But she, with a woman's instinct for shelter and home, cowered
+down before every one of Nature's menaces. And yet she bore up with
+remarkable courage.
+
+A mile or so before I came to the turn in my road the forest withdrew on
+both sides, yielding space to the fields and elbow-room for the wind
+to unfold its wings. As soon as its full force struck the cutter, the
+curtains began to emit that crackling sound which indicates to the
+sailor that he has turned his craft as far into the wind as he can
+safely do without losing speed. Little ripples ran through the bulging
+canvas. As yet I sat snug and sheltered within, my left shoulder turned
+to the weather, but soon I sighted dimly a curtain of trees that ran at
+right angles to my road. Behind it there stood a school building, and
+beyond that I should have to turn south. I gave the horses a walk. I
+decided to give them a walk of five minutes for every hour they trotted
+along. We reached the corner that way and I started them up again.
+
+Instantly things changed. We met the wind at an angle of about thirty
+degrees from the southeast. The air looked thick ahead. I moved into the
+left-hand corner of the seat, and though the full force of the wind did
+not strike me there, the whirling snow did not respect my shelter. It
+blew in slantways under the top, then described a curve upward, and
+downward again, as if it were going to settle on the right end of the
+back. But just before it touched the back, it turned at a sharp angle
+and piled on to my right side. A fair proportion of it reached my face
+which soon became wet and then caked over with ice. There was a sting
+to the flakes which made them rather disagreeable. My right eye kept
+closing up, and I had to wipe it ever so often to keep it open. The
+wind, too, for the first and only time on my drives, somehow found an
+entrance into the lower part of the cutter box, and though my feet were
+resting on the heater and my legs were wrapped, first in woollen and
+then in leather leggings, besides being covered with a good fur robe, my
+left side soon began to feel the cold. It may be that this comparative
+discomfort, which I had to endure for the better part of the day,
+somewhat coloured the kind of experience this drive became.
+
+As far as the road was concerned, I had as yet little to complain of.
+About three miles from the turn there stood a Lutheran church frequented
+by the Russian Germans that formed a settlement for miles around. They
+had made the trail for me on these three miles, and even for a matter of
+four or five miles south of the church, as I found out. It is that kind
+of a road which you want for long drives: where others who have short
+drives and, therefore, do not need to consider their horses break the
+crust of the snow and pack it down. I hoped that a goodly part of my
+day's trip would be in the nature of a chain of shorter, much frequented
+stretches; and on the whole I was not to be disappointed.
+
+Doubtless all my readers know how a country road that is covered with
+from two to three feet of snow will look when the trail is broken. There
+is a smooth expanse, mostly somewhat hardened at the surface, and there
+are two deep-cut tracks in it, each about ten to twelve inches wide,
+sharply defined, with the snow at the bottom packed down by the horses'
+feet and the runners of the respective conveyances. So long as you have
+such a trail and horses with road sense, you do not need to worry about
+your directions, no matter how badly it may blow. Horses that are used
+to travelling in the snow will never leave the trail, for they dread
+nothing so much as breaking in on the sides. This fact released my
+attention for other things.
+
+Now I thought again for a while of home, of how my wife would
+be worrying, how even the little girl would be infected by her
+nervousness--how she would ask, "Mamma, is Daddy in... now?" But I did
+not care to follow up these thoughts too far. They made me feel too
+soft.
+
+After that I just sat there for a while and looked ahead. But I saw only
+the whirl, whirl, whirl of the snow slanting across my field of vision.
+You are closed in by it as by insecure and ever receding walls when you
+drive in a snowstorm. If I had met a team, I could not have seen it, and
+if my safety had depended on my discerning it in time to turn out of the
+road, my safety would not have been very safe indeed. But I could rely
+on my horses: they would hear the bells of any encountering conveyance
+long enough ahead to betray it to me by their behaviour. And should I
+not even notice that, they would turn out in time of their own accord:
+they had a great deal of road sense.
+
+Weariness overcame me. In the open the howling and whistling of the wind
+always acts on me like a soporific. Inside of a house it is just the
+reverse; I know nothing that will keep my nerves as much on edge and
+prevent me as certainly from sleeping as the voices at night of a gale
+around the buildings. I needed something more definite to look at than
+that prospect ahead. The snow was by this time piling in on the seat at
+my right and in the box, so as to exclude all drafts except from below I
+felt that as a distinct advantage.
+
+Without any conscious intention I began to peer out below the slanting
+edge of the left side-curtain and to watch the sharp crest-wave of
+snow-spray thrown by the curve of the runner where it cut into the
+freshly accumulating mass. It looked like the wing-wave thrown to either
+side by the bow of a power boat that cuts swiftly through quiet water.
+From it my eye began to slip over to the snow expanse. The road was
+wide, lined with brush along the fence to the left. The fields beyond
+had no very large open areas--windbreaks had everywhere been spared
+out when the primeval forest had first been broken into by the early
+settlers. So whatever the force of the wind might be, no high drift
+layer could form. But still the snow drifted. There was enough coming
+down from above to supply material even on such a narrow strip as a road
+allowance. It was the manner of this drifting that held my eye and my
+attention at last.
+
+All this is, of course, utterly trivial. I had observed it myself a
+hundred times before. I observe it again to-day at this very writing,
+in the first blizzard of the season. It always has a strange fascination
+for me; but maybe I need to apologize for setting it down in writing.
+
+The wind would send the snowflakes at a sharp angle downward to the
+older surface. There was no impact, as there is with rain. The flakes,
+of course, did not rebound. But they did not come to rest either, not
+for the most imperceptible fraction of time. As soon as they touched the
+white, underlying surface, they would start to scud along horizontally
+at a most amazing speed, forming with their previous path an obtuse
+angle. So long as I watched the single flake--which is quite a task,
+especially while driving--it seemed to be in a tremendous hurry.
+It rushed along very nearly at the speed of the wind, and that was
+considerable, say between thirty-five and forty miles an hour or even
+more. But then, when it hit the trail, the crack made by horses and
+runners, strange to say, it did not fall down perpendicularly, as it
+would have done had it acted there under the influence of gravity alone;
+but it started on a curved path towards the lower edge of the opposite
+wall of the crack and there, without touching the wall, it started back,
+first downward, thus making the turn, and then upward again, towards the
+upper edge of the east wall, and not in a straight line either, but in a
+wavy curve, rising very nearly but not quite to the edge; and only then
+would it settle down against the eastern wall of the track, helping to
+fill it in. I watched this with all the utmost effort of attention of
+which I was capable. I became intensely interested in my observations. I
+even made sure--as sure as anybody can be of anything--that the whole of
+this curious path lay in the same perpendicular plane which ran from the
+southeast to the northwest, that is to say in the direction of the main
+current of the wind. I have since confirmed these observations many
+times.
+
+I am aware of the fact that nobody--nobody whom I know, at least--takes
+the slightest interest in such things. People watch birds because some
+"Nature-Study-cranks" (I am one of them) urge it in the schools. Others
+will make desultory observations on "Weeds" or "Native Trees." Our
+school work in this respect seems to me to be most ridiculously and
+palpably superficial. Worst of all, most of it is dry as dust, and it
+leads nowhere. I sometimes fear there is something wrong with my own
+mentality. But to me it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven lies all around
+us, and that most of us simply prefer the moving-picture-show. I have
+kept weather records for whole seasons--brief notes on the everyday
+observations of mere nothings. You, for whom above all I am setting
+these things down, will find them among my papers one day. They would
+seem meaningless to most of my fellow men, I believe; to me they are
+absorbingly interesting reading when once in a great while I pick an
+older record up and glance it over. But this is digressing.
+
+Now slowly, slowly another fact came home to me. This unanimous,
+synchronous march of all the flakes coming down over hundreds of square
+miles--and I was watching it myself over miles upon miles of road--in
+spite of the fact that every single flake seemed to be in the greatest
+possible hurry--was, judged as a whole, nevertheless an exceedingly
+leisurely process. In one respect it reminded me of bees swarming;
+watch the single bee, and it seems to fly at its utmost speed; watch the
+swarm, and it seems to be merely floating along. The reason, of course,
+is entirely different. The bees wheel and circle around individually,
+the whole swarm revolves--if I remember right, Burroughs has well
+described it (as what has he not?). [Footnote: Yes; I looked it up. See
+the "Pastoral Bees" in "Locusts and Wild Honey."] But the snow will not
+change its direction while drifting in a wind that blows straight ahead.
+Its direction is from first to last the resultant of the direction
+of the wind and that of the pull of gravity, into which there enters
+besides only the ratio of the strengths of these two forces. The single
+snowflake is to the indifferent eye something infinitesimal, too small
+to take individual notice of, once it reaches the ground. For most of us
+it hardly has any separate existence, however it may be to more astute
+observers. We see the flakes in the mass, and we judge by results. Now
+firstly, to talk of results, the filling up of a hollow, unless the
+drifting snow is simply picked up from the ground where it lay ready
+from previous falls, proceeds itself rather slowly and in quite a
+leisurely way. But secondly, and this is the more important reason, the
+wind blows in waves of greater and lesser density; these waves--and I
+do not know whether this observation has ever been recorded though
+doubtless it has been made by better observers than I am--these waves,
+I say, are propagated in a direction opposite to that of the wind. They
+are like sound-waves sent into the teeth of the wind, only they travel
+more slowly. Anybody who has observed a really splashing rain on smooth
+ground--on a cement sidewalk, for instance--must have observed that the
+rebounding drops, like those that are falling, form streaks, because
+they, too, are arranged in vertical layers--or sheets--of greater and
+lesser density--or maybe the term "frequency" would be more appropriate;
+and these streaks travel as compared with the wind, and, as compared
+with its direction, they travel against it. It is this that causes the
+curious criss-cross pattern of falling and rebounding rain-streaks in
+heavy showers. Quite likely there are more competent observers who might
+analyze these phenomena better than I can do it; but if nobody else
+does, maybe I shall one day make public a little volume containing
+observations on our summer rains. But again I am digressing.
+
+The snow, then, hits the surface of the older layers in waves, no matter
+whether the snow is freshly falling or merely drifting; and it is these
+waves that you notice most distinctly. Although they travel with the
+wind when you compare their position with points on the ground--yet,
+when compared with the rushing air above, it becomes clear that they
+travel against it. The waves, I say, not the flakes. The single flake
+never stops in its career, except as it may be retarded by friction
+and other resistances. But the aggregation of the multitudes of flakes,
+which varies constantly in its substance, creates the impression as if
+the snow travelled very much more slowly than in reality it does. In
+other words, every single flake, carried on by inertia, constantly
+passes from one air wave to the next one, but the waves themselves
+remain relatively stationary. They swing along in undulating,
+comparatively slow-moving sheets which may simply be retarded behind the
+speed of the wind, but more probably form an actual reaction, set up by
+a positive force counteracting the wind, whatever its origin may be.
+
+When at last I had fully satisfied my mind as to the somewhat
+complicated mechanics of this thing, I settled back in my seat--against
+a cushion of snow that had meanwhile piled in behind my spine. If I
+remember right, I had by this time well passed the church. But for a
+while longer I looked out through the triangular opening between the
+door of the cutter and the curtain. I did not watch snowflakes or waves
+any longer, but I matured an impression. At last it ripened into words.
+
+Yes, the snow, as figured in the waves, CRAWLED over the ground. There
+was in the image that engraved itself on my memory something cruel--I
+could not help thinking of the "cruel, crawling foam" and the ruminating
+pedant Ruskin, and I laughed. "The cruel, crawling snow!" Yes, and in
+spite of Ruskin and his "Pathetic Fallacy," there it was! Of course, the
+snow is not cruel. Of course, it merely is propelled by something
+which, according to Karl Pearson, I do not even with a good scientific
+conscience dare to call a "force" any longer. But nevertheless, it made
+the impression of cruelty, and in that lay its fascination and beauty.
+It even reminded me of a cat slowly reaching out with armed claw for the
+"innocent" bird. But the cat is not cruel either--we merely call it so!
+Oh, for the juggling of words!...
+
+Suddenly my horses brought up on a farmyard. They had followed the last
+of the church-goers' trails, had not seen any other trail ahead and
+faithfully done their horse-duty by staying on what they considered to
+be the road.
+
+I had reached the northern limit of that two-mile stretch of wild land.
+In summer there is a distinct and good road here, but for the present
+the snow had engulfed it. When I had turned back to the bend of the
+trail, I was for the first time up against a small fraction of what was
+to come. No trail, and no possibility of telling the direction in which
+I was going! Fortunately I realized the difficulty right from the start.
+Before setting out, I looked back to the farm and took my bearings from
+the fence of the front yard which ran north-south. Then I tried to hold
+to the line thus gained as best I could. It was by no means an easy
+matter, for I had to wind my weary way around old and new drifts, brush
+and trees. The horses were mostly up to their knees in snow, carefully
+lifting their hindlegs to place them in the cavities which their
+forelegs made. Occasionally, much as I tried to avoid it, I had to make
+a short dash through a snow dam thrown up over brush that seemed to
+encircle me completely. The going, to be sure, was not so heavy as it
+had been the day before on the corner of the marsh, but on the other
+hand I could not see as far beyond the horses' heads. And had I been
+able to see, the less conspicuous landmarks would not have helped
+me since I did not know them. It took us about an hour to cross this
+untilled and unfenced strip. I came out on the next crossroad, not
+more than two hundred yards east of where I should have come out. I
+considered that excellent; but I soon was to understand that it was
+owing only to the fact that so far I had had no flying drifts to go
+through. Up to this point the snow was "crawling" only wherever the
+thicket opened up a little. What blinded my vision had so far been only
+the new, falling snow.
+
+I am sure I looked like a snowman. Whenever I shook my big gauntlets
+bare, a cloud of exceedingly fine and hard snow crystals would hit my
+face; and seeing how much I still had ahead, I cannot say that I liked
+the sensation. I was getting thoroughly chilled by this time. The
+mercury probably stood at somewhere between minus ten and twenty. The
+very next week I made one trip at forty below--a thermometer which I
+saw and the accuracy of which I have reason to doubt showed minus
+forty-eight degrees. Anyway, it was the coldest night of the winter, but
+I was not to suffer then. I remember how about five in the morning, when
+I neared the northern correction line, my lips began to stiffen; hard,
+frozen patches formed on my cheeks, and I had to allow the horses to rub
+their noses on fence posts or trees every now and then, to knock the
+big icicles off and to prevent them from freezing up altogether--but.
+my feet and my hands and my body kept warm, for there was no wind. On
+drives like these your well-being depends largely on the state of your
+feet and hands. But on this return trip I surely did suffer. Every
+now and then my fingers would turn curd-white, and I had to remove my
+gauntlets and gloves, and to thrust my hands under my wraps, next to
+my body. I also froze two toes rather badly. And what I remember as
+particularly disagreeable, was that somehow my scalp got chilled.
+Slowly, slowly the wind seemed to burrow its way under my fur-cap and
+into my hair. After a while it became impossible for me to move scalp
+or brows. One side of my face was now thickly caked over with ice--which
+protected, but also on account of its stiffness caused a minor
+discomfort. So far, however, I had managed to keep both my eyes at work.
+And for a short while I needed them just now.
+
+We were crossing a drift which had apparently not been broken into since
+it had first been piled up the previous week. Such drifts are dangerous
+because they will bear up for a while under the horses' weight, and then
+the hard pressed crust will break and reveal a softer core inside. Just
+that happened here, and exactly at a moment, too, when the drifting
+snow caught me with its full force and at its full height. It was a
+quarter-minute of stumbling, jumping, pulling one against the other--and
+then a rally, and we emerged in front of a farmyard from which a fairly
+fresh trail led south. This trail was filled in, it is true, for the
+wind here pitched the snow by the shovelful, but the difference in
+colour between the pure white, new snow that filled it and the older
+surface to both sides made it sufficiently distinct for the horses to
+guide them. They plodded along.
+
+Here miles upon miles of open fields lay to the southeast, and the snow
+that fell over all these fields was at once picked up by the wind and
+started its irresistible march to the northwest. And no longer did it
+crawl. Since it was bound upon a long-distance trip, somewhere in its
+career it would be caught in an upward sweep of the wind and thrown
+aloft, and then it would hurtle along at the speed of the wind, blotting
+everything from sight, hitting hard whatever it encountered, and piling
+in wherever it found a sheltered space. The height of this drifting snow
+layer varies, of course, directly and jointly (here the teacher makes
+fun of his mathematics) as the amount of loose snow available and as the
+carrying force of the wind. Many, many years ago I once saved the day
+by climbing on to the seat of my cutter and looking around from this
+vantage-point. I was lost and had no idea of where I was. There was no
+snowstorm going on at the time, but a recent snowfall was being driven
+along by a merciless northern gale. As soon as I stood erect on my
+seat, my head reached into a less dense drift layer, and I could clearly
+discern a farmhouse not more than a few hundred yards away. I had been
+on the point of accepting it as a fact that I was lost. Those tactics
+would not have done on this particular day, there being the snowstorm to
+reckon with. For the moment, not being lost, I was in no need of them,
+anyway. But even later the possible but doubtful advantage to be gained
+by them seemed more than offset by the great and certain disadvantage of
+having to get out of my robes and to expose myself to the chilling wind.
+
+This north-south road was in the future invariably to seem endlessly
+long to me. There were no very prominent landmarks--a school
+somewhere--and there was hardly any change in the monotony of driving.
+As for landmarks, I should mention that there was one more at least.
+About two miles from the turn into that town which I have mentioned I
+crossed a bridge, and beyond this bridge the trail sloped sharply up
+in an s-shaped curve to a level about twenty or twenty-five feet higher
+than that of the road along which I had been driving. The bridge had a
+rail on its west side; but the other rail had been broken down in some
+accident and had never been replaced. I mention this trifle because it
+became important in an incident during the last drive which I am going
+to describe.
+
+On we went. We passed the school of which I did not see much except the
+flagpole. And then we came to the crossroads where the trail bent west
+into the town. If I had known the road more thoroughly, I should have
+turned there, too. It would have added another two miles to my already
+overlong trip, but I invariably did it later on. Firstly, the horses
+will rest up much more completely when put into a stable for feeding.
+And secondly, there always radiate from a town fairly well beaten
+trails. It is a mistake to cut across from one such trail to another.
+The straight road, though much shorter, is apt to be entirely
+untravelled, and to break trail after a heavy snowstorm is about as hard
+a task as any that you can put your team up against. I had the road;
+there was no mistaking it; it ran along between trees and fences which
+were plainly visible; but there were ditches and brush buried under the
+snow which covered the grade to a depth of maybe three feet, and every
+bit of these drifts was of that treacherous character that I have
+described.
+
+If you look at some small drift piled up, maybe, against the glass pane
+of a storm window, you can plainly see how the snow, even in such
+a miniature pile, preserves the stratified appearance which is the
+consequence of its being laid down in layers of varying density. Now
+after it has been lying for some time, it will form a crust on top which
+is sometimes the effect of wind pressure and sometimes--under favourable
+conditions--of superficial glaciation. A similar condensation takes
+place at the bottom as the result of the work of gravity: a harder core
+will form. Between the two there is layer upon layer of comparatively
+softer snow. In these softer layers the differences which are due to the
+stratified precipitation still remain. And frequently they will make the
+going particularly uncertain; for a horse will break through in stages
+only. He thinks that he has reached the carrying stratum, gets ready to
+take his next step--thereby throwing his whole weight on two or at best
+three feet--and just when he is off his balance, there is another caving
+in. I believe it is this what makes horses so nervous when crossing
+drifts. Later on in the winter there is, of course, the additional
+complication of successive snowfalls. The layers from this cause are
+usually clearly discernible by differences in colour.
+
+I have never figured out just how far I went along this entirely
+unbroken road, but I believe it must have been for two miles. I know
+that my horses were pretty well spent by the time we hit upon another
+trail. It goes without saying that this trail, too, though it came from
+town, had not been gone over during the day and therefore consisted of
+nothing but a pair of whiter ribbons on the drifts; but underneath these
+ribbons the snow was packed. Hardly anybody cares to be out on a day
+like that, not even for a short drive. And though in this respect I
+differ in my tastes from other people, provided I can keep myself from
+actually getting chilled, even I began to feel rather forlorn, and that
+is saying a good deal.
+
+A few hundred yards beyond the point where we had hit upon this new
+trail which was only faintly visible, the horses turned eastward, on to
+a field. Between two posts the wire of the fence had been taken down,
+and since I could not see any trail leading along the road further
+south, I let my horses have their will. I knew the farm on which we
+were. It was famous all around for its splendid, pure-bred beef cattle
+herd. I had not counted on crossing it, but I knew that after a mile
+of this field trail I should emerge on the farmyard, and since I was
+particularly well acquainted with the trail from there across the wild
+land to Bell's corner, it suited me to do as my horses suggested. As a
+matter of fact this trail became--with the exception of one drive--my
+regular route for the rest of the winter. Never again was I to meet with
+the slightest mishap on this particular run. But to-day I was to come as
+near getting lost as I ever came during the winter, on those drives to
+and from the north.
+
+For the next ten minutes I watched the work of the wind on the open
+field. As is always the case with me, I was not content with recording
+a mere observation. I had watched the thing a hundred times before.
+"Observing" means to me as much finding words to express what I see as
+it means the seeing itself. Now, when a housewife takes a thin
+sheet that is lying on the bed and shakes it up without changing its
+horizontal position, the running waves of air caught under the cloth
+will throw it into a motion very similar to that which the wind imparts
+to the snow-sheets, only that the snow-sheets will run down instead of
+up. Under a good head of wind there is a vehemence in this motion
+that suggests anger and a violent disposition. The sheets of snow
+are "flapped" down. Then suddenly the direction of the wind changes
+slightly, and the sheet is no longer flapped down but blown up. At the
+line where the two motions join we have that edge the appearance
+of which suggested to me the comparison with "exfoliated" rock in
+a previous paper. It is for this particular stage in the process of
+bringing about that appearance that I tentatively proposed the term
+"adfoliation." "Adfoliated" edges are always to be found on the lee side
+of the sheet.
+
+Sometimes, however, the opposite process will bring about nearly the
+same result. The snow-sheet has been spread, and a downward sweep of
+violent wind will hit the surface, denting it, scraping away an edge
+of the top layer, and usually gripping through into lower layers; then,
+rebounding, it will lift the whole sheet up again, or any part of it;
+and, shattering it into its component crystals, will throw these aloft
+and afar to be laid down again further on. This is true "exfoliation."
+Since it takes a more violent burst of wind to effect this true
+exfoliation than it does to bring about the adfoliation, and since,
+further, the snow once indented, will yield to the depth of several
+layers, the true exfoliation edges are usually thicker than the others:
+and, of course, they are always to be found on the wind side.
+
+Both kinds of lines are wavy lines because the sheets of wind are
+undulating. In this connection I might repeat once more that the
+straight line seems to be quite unknown in Nature, as also is uniformity
+of motion. I once watched very carefully a ferry cable strung across
+the bottom of a mighty river, and, failing to discover any theoretical
+reason for its vibratory motion, I was thrown back upon proving to my
+own satisfaction that the motion even of that flowing water in the river
+was the motion of a pulse; and I still believe that my experiments were
+conclusive. Everybody, of course, is familiar with the vibrations of
+telephone wires in a breeze. That humming sound which they emit would
+indeed be hard to explain without the assumption of a pulsating blow. Of
+course, it is easy to prove this pulsation in air. From certain further
+observations, which I do not care to speak about at present, I am
+inclined to assume a pulsating arrangement, or an alternation of
+layers of greater and lesser density in all organised--that is,
+crystalline--matter; for instance, in even such an apparently uniform
+block as a lump of metallic gold or copper or iron. This arrangement, of
+course, may be disturbed by artificial means; but if it is, the matter
+seems to be in an unstable condition, as is proved, for instance, by the
+sudden, unexpected breaking of apparently perfectly sound steel rails.
+There seems to be a condition of matter which so far we have largely
+failed to take into account or to utilise in human affairs...
+
+I reached the yard, crossed it, and swung out through the front gate.
+Nowhere was anybody to be seen. The yard itself is sheltered by a
+curtain of splendid wild trees to the north, the east, and the south. So
+I had a breathing spell for a few minutes. I could also clearly see the
+gap in this windbreak through which I must reach the open. I think I
+mentioned that on the previous drive, going north, I had found the road
+four or five miles east of here very good indeed. But the reason had
+been that just this windbreak, which angles over to what I have been
+calling the twelve-mile bridge, prevented all serious drifting while the
+wind came from the north. To-day I was to find things different, for to
+the south the land was altogether open. The force of the wind alone was
+sufficient to pull the horses back to a walk, before we even had quite
+reached the open plain. It was a little after four when I crossed the
+gap, and I knew that I should have to make the greater part of what
+remained in darkness. I was about twelve miles from town, I should
+judge. The horses had not been fed. So, as soon as I saw how things
+were, I turned back into the shelter of the bluff to feed. I might have
+gone to the farm, but I was afraid it would cost too much time. After
+this I always went into town and fed in the stable. While the horses
+were eating and resting, I cleaned the cutter of snow looked after my
+footwarmer, and, by tramping about and kicking against the tree trunks,
+tried to get my benumbed circulation started again. My own lunch on
+examination proved to be frozen into one hard, solid lump. So I decided
+to go without it and to save it for my supper.
+
+At half past four we crossed the gap in the bluffs for the second time.
+
+Words fail me to describe or even to suggest the fury of the blast and
+of the drift into which we emerged. For a moment I thought the top of
+the cutter would be blown off. With the twilight that had set in the
+wind had increased to a baffling degree. The horses came as near as they
+ever came, in any weather, to turning on me and refusing to face the
+gale. And what with my blurred vision, the twisting and dodging about of
+the horses, and the gathering dusk, I soon did not know any longer where
+I was. There was ample opportunity to go wrong. Copses, single trees,
+and burnt stumps which dotted the wilderness had a knack of looming up
+with startling suddenness in front or on the side, sometimes dangerously
+close to the cutter. It was impossible to look straight ahead, because
+the ice crystals which mimicked snow cut right into my eyes and made
+my lids smart with soreness. Underfoot the rough ground seemed like a
+heaving sea. The horses would stumble, and the cutter would pitch over
+from one side to the other in the most alarming way. I saw no remedy.
+It was useless to try to avoid the obstacles--only once did I do so, and
+that time I had to back away from a high stump against which my drawbar
+had brought up. The pitching and rolling of the cutter repeatedly shook
+me out of my robes, and if, when starting up again from the bluff, I had
+felt a trifle more comfortable, that increment of consolation was soon
+lost.
+
+We wallowed about--there is only this word to suggest the motion. To all
+intents and purposes I was lost. But still there was one thing, provided
+it had not changed, to tell me the approximate direction--the wind.
+It had been coming from the south-southeast. So, by driving along very
+nearly into its teeth, I could, so I thought, not help emerging on the
+road to town.
+
+Repeatedly I wished I had taken the old trail. That fearful drift in the
+bush beyond the creek, I thought, surely had settled down somewhat in
+twenty-four hours. [Footnote: As a matter of fact I was to see it once
+more before the winter was over, and I found it settled down to about
+one third its original height. This was partly the result of superficial
+thawing. But still even then, shortly before the final thaw-up, it
+looked formidable enough.] I had had as much or more of unbroken trail
+to-day as on the day before. On the whole, though, I still believed that
+the four miles across the corner of the marsh south of the creek had
+been without a parallel in their demands on the horses' endurance. And
+gradually I came to see that after all the horses probably would have
+given out before this, under the cumulative effect of two days of it,
+had they not found things somewhat more endurable to-day.
+
+We wallowed along... And then we stopped. I shouted to the
+horses--nothing but a shout could have the slightest effect against the
+wind. They started to fidget and to dance and to turn this way and that,
+but they would not go. I wasted three or four minutes before I shook
+free of my robes and jumped out to investigate. Well, we were in the
+corner formed by two fences--caught as in a trap. I was dumbfounded.
+I did not know of any fence in these parts, of none where I thought
+I should be. And how had we got into it? I had not passed through any
+gate. There was, of course, no use in conjecturing. If the wind had not
+veered around completely, one of the fences must run north-south, the
+other one east-west, and we were in the southeast corner of some farm.
+Where there was a fence, I was likely to find a farmyard. It could not
+be to the east, so there remained three guesses. I turned back to the
+west. I skirted the fence closely, so closely that even in the failing
+light and in spite of the drifting snow I did not lose sight of it. Soon
+the going began to be less rough; the choppy motion of the cutter seemed
+to indicate that we were on fall-ploughed land; and not much later Peter
+gave a snort. We were apparently nearing a group of buildings. I heard
+the heavy thump of galloping horses, and a second later I saw a light
+which moved.
+
+I hailed the man; and he came over and answered my questions. Yes, the
+wind had turned somewhat; it came nearly from the east now (so that was
+what had misled me); I was only half a mile west of my old trail, but
+still, for all that, nearly twelve miles from town. In this there was
+good news as well as bad. I remembered the place now; just south of the
+twelve-mile bridge I had often caught sight of it to the west. Instead
+of crossing the wild land along its diagonal, I had, deceived by the
+changed direction of the wind, skirted its northern edge, holding
+close to the line of poplars. I thought of the fence: yes, the man who
+answered my questions was renting from the owner of that pure-bred Angus
+herd; he was hauling wood for him and had taken the fence on the west
+side down. I had passed between two posts without noticing them. He
+showed me the south gate and gave me the general direction. He even
+offered my horses water, which they drank eagerly enough. But he did not
+offer bed and stable-room for the night; nor did he open the gate
+for me, as I had hoped he would. I should have declined the night's
+accommodation, but I should have been grateful for a helping hand at the
+gate. I had to get out of my wraps to open it. And meanwhile I had been
+getting out and in so often, that I did no longer even care to clean my
+feet of snow; I simply pushed the heater aside so as to prevent it from
+melting.
+
+I "bundled in"--that word, borrowed from an angry lady, describes my
+mood perhaps better than anything else I might say. And yet, though what
+followed, was not exactly pleasure, my troubles were over for the day.
+The horses, of course, still had a weary, weary time of it, but as soon
+as we got back to our old trail--which we presently did--they knew the
+road at least. I saw that the very moment we reached it by the way they
+turned on to it and stepped out more briskly.
+
+From this point on we had about eleven miles to make, and every step
+of it was made at a walk. I cannot, of course say much about the road.
+There was nothing for me to do except as best I could to fight the wind.
+I got my tarpaulin out from under the seat and spread it over myself. I
+verily believe I nodded repeatedly. It did not matter. I knew that the
+horses would take me home, and since it was absolutely dark, I could
+not have helped it had they lost their way. A few times, thinking that I
+noticed an improvement in the road, I tried to speed the horses up; but
+when Dan at last, in an attempt to respond, went down on his knees,
+I gave it up. Sometimes we pitched and rolled again for a space, but
+mostly things went quietly enough. The wind made a curious sound,
+something between an infuriated whistle and the sibilant noise a man
+makes when he draws his breath in sharply between his teeth.
+
+I do not know how long we may have been going that way. But I remember
+how at last suddenly and gradually I realized that there was a change in
+our motion. Suddenly, I say--for the realization of the change came as a
+surprise; probably I had been nodding, and I started up. Gradually--for
+I believe it took me quite an appreciable time before I awoke to the
+fact that the horses at last were trotting. It was a weary, slow,
+jogging trot--but it electrified me, for I knew at once that we were on
+our very last mile. I strained my eye-sight, but I could see no light
+ahead. In fact, we were crossing the bridge before I saw the first light
+of the town.
+
+The livery stable was deserted. I had to open the doors, to drive in,
+to unhitch, to unharness, and to feed the horses myself. And then I went
+home to my cold and lonesome house.
+
+It was a cheerless night.
+
+
+
+
+SIX. A Call for Speed
+
+I held the horses in at the start. Somehow they realized that a new kind
+of test was ahead. They caught the infection of speed from my voice,
+I suppose, or from my impatience. They had not been harnessed by the
+hostler either. When I came to the stable--it was in the forenoon, too,
+at an hour when they had never been taken out before--the hostler had
+been away hauling feed. The boys whom I had pressed into service had
+pulled the cutter out into the street; it was there we hitched up.
+Everything, then, had been different from the way they had been used to.
+So, when at last I clicked my tongue, they bounded off as if they were
+out for a sprint of a few miles only.
+
+I held them in and pulled them down to a trot; for of all days to-day
+was it of the utmost importance that neither one of them should play
+out. At half past twelve a telephone message had reached me, after
+having passed through three different channels, that my little girl was
+sick; and over the wire it had a sinister, lugubrious, reticent sound,
+as if the worst was held back. Details had not come through, so I was
+told. My wife was sending a call for me to come home as quickly as I
+possibly could; nothing else. It was Thursday. The Sunday before I had
+left wife and child in perfect health. But scarlatina and diphtheria
+were stalking the plains. The message had been such a shock to me that I
+had acted with automatic precision. I had notified the school-board and
+asked the inspector to substitute for me; and twenty minutes after word
+had reached me I crossed the bridge on the road to the north.
+
+The going was heavy but not too bad. Two nights ago there had been
+a rather bad snowstorm and a blow, and during the last night an
+exceedingly slight and quiet fall had followed it. Just now I had no eye
+for its beauty, though.
+
+I was bent on speed, and that meant watching the horses closely; they
+must not be allowed to follow their own bent. There was no way of
+communicating with my wife; so that, whatever I could do, was left
+entirely to my divination. I had picked up a few things at the drug
+store--things which had occurred to me on the spur of the moment
+as likely to be needed; but now I started a process of analysis and
+elimination. Pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlatina and measles--all these
+were among the more obvious possibilities. I was enough of a doctor to
+trust my ability to diagnose. I knew that my wife would in that respect
+rather rely on me than on the average country-town practitioner. All the
+greater was my responsibility.
+
+Since the horses had not been fed for their midday-meal, I had in any
+case to put in at the one-third-way town. It had a drug store; so there
+was my last chance of getting what might possibly be needed. I made a
+list of remedies and rehearsed it mentally till I felt sure I should not
+omit anything of which I had thought.
+
+Then I caught myself at driving the horses into a gallop. It was hard to
+hold in. I must confess that I thought but little of the little girl's
+side of it; more of my wife's; most of all of my own. That seems
+selfish. But ever since the little girl was born, there had been only
+one desire which filled my life. Where I had failed, she was to succeed.
+Where I had squandered my energies and opportunities, she was to use
+them to some purpose. What I might have done but had not done, she was
+to do. She was to redeem me. I was her natural teacher. Teaching her
+became henceforth my life-work. When I bought a book, I carefully
+considered whether it would help her one day or not before I spent the
+money. Deprived of her, I myself came to a definite and peremptory end.
+With her to continue my life, there was still some purpose in things,
+some justification for existence.
+
+Most serious-minded men at my age, I believe, become profoundly
+impressed with the futility of "it all." Unless we throw ourselves into
+something outside of our own personality, life is apt to impress us as
+a great mockery. I am afraid that at the bottom of it there lies the
+recognition of the fact that we ourselves were not worth while, that we
+did not amount to what we had thought we should amount to; that we did
+not measure up to the exigencies of eternities to come. Children are
+among the most effective means devised by Nature to delude us into
+living on. Modern civilization has, on the whole, deprived us of the
+ability for the enjoyment of the moment. It raises our expectations too
+high--realization is bound to fall short, no matter what we do. We
+live in an artificial atmosphere. So we submerge ourselves in business,
+profession, or superficial amusement. We live for something--do not
+merely live. The wage-slave lives for the evening's liberty, the
+business man for his wealth, the preacher for his church. I used to live
+for my school. Then a moment like the one I was living through arrives.
+Nature strips down our pretences with a relentless finger, and we stand,
+bare of disguises, as helpless failures. We have lost the childlike
+power of living without conscious aims. Sometimes, when the aims have
+faded already in the gathering dusk, we still go on by the momentum
+acquired. Inertia carries us over the dead points--till a cog breaks
+somewhere, and our whole machinery of life comes to with a jar. If no
+such awakening supervenes, since we never live in the present, we
+are always looking forward to what never comes; and so life slips by,
+unlived.
+
+If my child was taken from me, it meant that my future was made
+meaningless. I felt that I might just as well lie down and die.
+
+There was injustice in this, I know I was reasoning, as it were, in a
+phantom world. Actualities, outlooks, retrospections--my view of them
+had been jarred and distorted by an unexpected, stunning blow. For that
+it did not really matter how things actually were up north. I had never
+yet faced such possibilities; they opened up like an abyss which I had
+skirted in the dark, unknowingly. True, my wife was something like a
+child to me. I was old enough to be her father, older even in mind than
+in actual years. But she, too, by marrying an aging man, had limited her
+own development, as it were, by mine. Nor was she I, after all. My child
+was. The outlook without her was night. Such a life was not to be lived.
+
+There was the lash of a scourge in these thoughts, so that I became
+nervous, impatient, and unjust--even to the horses. Peter stumbled, and
+I came near punishing him with my whip. But I caught myself just before
+I yielded to the impulse. I was doing exactly what I should not do. If
+Peter stumbled, it was more my own fault than his. I should have
+watched the road more carefully instead of giving in to the trend of my
+thoughts. A stumble every five minutes, and over a drive of forty-five
+miles: that might mean a delay of half an hour--it might mean the
+difference between "in time" and "too late." I did not know what waited
+at the other end of the road. It was my business to find out, not to
+indulge in mere surmises and forebodings.
+
+So, with an effort, I forced my attention to revert to the things
+around. And Nature, with her utter lack of sentiment, is after all the
+only real soother of anguished nerves. With my mind in the state it was
+in, the drive would indeed have been nothing less than torture, had I
+not felt, sometimes even against my will, mostly without at any rate
+consciously yielding to it, the influence of that merriest of all winter
+sights which surrounded me.
+
+The fresh fall of snow, which had come over night, was exceedingly
+slight. It had come down softly, floatingly, with all the winds of
+the prairies hushed, every flake consisting of one or two large, flat
+crystals only, which, on account of the nearly saturated air, had
+gone on growing by condensation till they touched the ground. Such a
+condition of the atmosphere never holds out in a prolonged snowfall,
+may it come down ever so soft-footedly; the first half hour exhausts the
+moisture content of the air. After that the crystals are the ordinary,
+small, six-armed "stars" which bunch together into flakes. But if the
+snowfall is very slight, the moisture content of the lower air sometimes
+is not exhausted before it stops; those large crystals remain at the
+surface and are not buried out of sight by the later fall. These large,
+coarse, slablike crystals reflect as well as refract the light of the
+sun. There is not merely the sparkle and glitter, but also the colour
+play. Facing north, you see only glittering points of white light; but,
+facing the sun, you see every colour of the rainbow, and you see it
+with that coquettish, sudden flash which snow shares only with the most
+precious of stones.
+
+Through such a landscape covered with the thinnest possible sheet of
+the white glitter we sped. A few times, in heavier snow, the horses were
+inclined to fall into a walk; but a touch of the whip sent them
+into line again. I began to view the whole situation more quietly.
+Considering that we had forty-five miles to go, we were doing very well
+indeed. We made Bell's corner in forty minutes, and still I was saving
+the horses' strength.
+
+On to the wild land we turned, where the snow underfoot was soft and
+free from those hard clods that cause the horses' feet to stumble.
+I beguiled the time by watching the distance through the surrounding
+brush. Everybody, of course, has noticed how the open landscape seems to
+turn when you speed along. The distance seems to stand still, while
+the foreground rushes past you. The whole countryside seems to become a
+revolving, horizontal wheel with its hub at the horizon. It is different
+when you travel fast through half open bush, so that the eye on its way
+to the edge of the visible world looks past trees and shrubs. In that
+case there are two points which speed along: you yourself, and with you,
+engaged, as it were, in a race with you, the distance. You can go many
+miles before your horizon changes. But between it and yourself the
+foreground is rushed back like a ribbon. There is no impression of
+wheeling; there is no depth to that ribbon which moves backward and
+past. You are also more distinctly aware that it is not the objects near
+you which move, but you yourself. Only a short distance from you trees
+and objects seem rather to move with you, though more slowly; and faster
+and faster all things seem to be moving in the same direction with you,
+the farther away they are, till at last the utmost distance rushes along
+at an equal speed, behind all the stems of the shrubs and the trees, and
+keeps up with you.
+
+So is it truly in life. My childhood seems as near to me now as it was
+when I was twenty--nearer, I sometimes think; but the years of my
+early manhood have rushed by like that ribbon and are half swallowed by
+oblivion.
+
+This line of thought threw me back into heavier moods. And yet, since
+now I banished the hardest of all thoughts hard to bear, I could not
+help succumbing to the influence of Nature's merry mood. I did so even
+more than I liked. I remember that, while driving through the beautiful
+natural park that masks the approach to the one-third-way town from
+the south, I as much as reproached myself because I allowed Nature to
+interfere with my grim purpose of speed. Half intentionally I conjured
+up the vision of an infinitely lonesome old age for myself, and again
+the sudden palpitation in my veins nearly prompted me to send my horses
+into a gallop. But instantly I checked myself. Not yet, I thought. On
+that long stretch north, beyond the bridge, there I was going to drive
+them at their utmost speed. I was unstrung, I told myself; this was
+mere sentimentalism; no emotional impulses were of any value; careful
+planning only counted. So I even pulled the horses back to a walk. I
+wanted to feed them shortly after reaching the stable. They must not be
+hot, or I should have trouble.
+
+Then we turned into the main street of the town. In front of the stable
+I deliberately assumed the air of a man of leisure. The hostler came out
+and greeted me. I let him water the horses and waited, watch in hand.
+They got some hay, and five minutes after I had stopped, I poured their
+oats into the feeding boxes.
+
+Then to the drug store--it was locked. I hunted the druggist all over
+town for nearly twenty minutes. Everybody had seen him a short while
+ago; everybody knew exactly where he had been a minute before; but
+nobody could discover him just then. I worked myself into a veritable
+frenzy of hurry. The moisture began to break out all over my body.
+I rushed back to the livery stable to tell the hostler to hitch up
+again--and there stood the druggist, looking my horses over! I shall not
+repeat what I said.
+
+Five minutes later I had what I wanted, and after a few minutes more I
+walked my horses out of town. It had taken me an hour and fifty minutes
+to make the town, and thirty-five minutes to leave it behind.
+
+One piece of good news I received before leaving. While I was getting
+into my robes and the hostler hooked up, he told me that no fewer than
+twenty-two teams had that very morning come in with cordwood from the
+northern correction line. They had made a farm halfways to town by
+nightfall of the day before; the rest they had gone that very day. So
+there would be an unmistakable trail all the way, and there was no need
+to worry over the snow.
+
+I walked the horses for a while; then, when we were swinging round the
+turn to the north, on that long, twenty-mile grade, I speeded them up.
+The trail was good: that just about summarizes what I remember of the
+road. All details were submerged in one now, and that one was speed. The
+horses, which were in prime condition, gave me their best. Sometimes we
+went over long stretches that were sandy under that inch or so of new
+snow--with sand blown over the older drifts from the fields--stretches
+where under ordinary circumstances I should have walked my horses--at
+a gallop. Once or twice we crossed bad drifts with deep holes in them,
+made by horses that were being wintered outside and that had broken in
+before the snow had hardened down sufficiently to carry them. There, of
+course, I had to go slowly. But as soon as the trail was smooth again,
+the horses would fall back into their stride without being urged.
+They had, as I said, caught the infection. My yearning for speed was
+satisfied at last.
+
+Four sights stand out.
+
+The first is of just such bunches of horses that were being brought
+through the winter with practically no yard feeding at all; and
+consequently their healthy outdoor looks, and their velvety rumps were
+very conspicuous as they scattered away from the trail on our approach.
+Several times we dashed right in among them, and I had to shout in order
+to clear the road. They did not like to leave the firm footing on the
+trail, where they fed by pawing away the snow on both sides and baring
+the weeds. Sometimes a whole bunch of them would thunder along in a
+stampede ahead of us till they came to a cross-trail or to a farmyard;
+there we left them behind. Sometimes only one of them would thus try
+to keep in front, while the rest jumped off into the drifts; but, being
+separated from his mates, he would stop at last and ponder how to get
+back to them till we were right on him again. There was, then, no way to
+rejoin those left behind except by doing what he hated to do, by getting
+off the trail and jumping into the dreaded snow, thus giving us the
+right of way. And when, at last, he did so, he felt sadly hampered and
+stopped close to the trail, looking at us in a frightened and helpless
+sort of way while we dashed by.
+
+The next sight, too, impressed me with the degree to which snow
+handicaps the animal life of our plains. Not more than ten feet from
+the heads of my horses a rabbit started up. The horses were going at a
+gallop just then. There it jumped up, unseen by myself until it moved,
+ears high, eyes turned back, and giving a tremendous thump with its big
+hind feet before setting out on its wild and desperate career. We were
+pretty close on its heels and going fast. For maybe a quarter of a mile
+it stayed in one track, running straight ahead and at the top of its
+speed so that it pulled noticeably away. Every hundred yards or so,
+however, it would slow down a little, and its jumps, as it glanced back
+without turning--by merely taking a high, flying leap and throwing its
+head aloft--would look strangely retarded, as if it were jumping from
+a sitting posture or braking with its hind feet while bending its
+body backward. Then, seeing us follow at undiminished speed, it would
+straighten out again and dart away like an arrow. At the end of its
+first straight run it apparently made up its mind that it was time
+to employ somewhat different tactics in order to escape. So it jumped
+slantways across the soft, central cushion of the trail into the other
+track. Again it ran straight ahead for a matter of four or five hundred
+yards, slowing down three or four times to reconnoitre in its rear.
+After that it ran in a zigzag line, taking four or five jumps in one
+track, crossing over into the other with a gigantic leap, at an angle
+of not more than thirty degrees to its former direction; then, after
+another four or five bounds, crossing back again, and so on. About every
+tenth jump was now a high leap for scouting purposes, I should say. It
+looked breathless, frantic, and desperate. But it kept it up for several
+miles. I am firmly convinced that rabbits distinguish between the man
+with a gun and the one without it. This little animal probably knew that
+I had no gun. But what was it to do? It was caught on the road with us
+bearing down upon it. It knew that it did not stand a chance of getting
+even beyond reach of a club if it ventured out into the deep, loose
+snow. There might be dogs ahead, but it had to keep on and take that
+risk. I pitied the poor thing, but I did not stop. I wished for a
+cross-trail to appear, so it would be relieved of its panic; and at last
+there came one, too, which it promptly took.
+
+And as if to prove still more strikingly how helpless many of our wild
+creatures are in deep snow, the third sight came. We started a prairie
+chicken next. It had probably been resting in the snow to the right
+side of the trail. It began to run when the horses came close. And in a
+sudden panic as it was, it did the most foolish thing it possibly could
+do: it struck a line parallel to the trail. Apparently the soft snow in
+which it sank prevented it from taking to its wings. It had them lifted,
+but it did not even use them in running as most of the members of its
+family will do; it ran in little jumps or spurts, trying its level
+best to keep ahead. But the horses were faster. They caught up with it,
+passed it. And slowly I pulled abreast. Its efforts certainly were as
+frantic as those of the rabbit had looked. I could have picked it up
+with my hands. Its beak was open with the exertion--the way you see
+chickens walking about with open beaks on a swooningly hot summer day I
+reached for the whip to lower it in front of the bird and stop it from
+this unequal race. It cowered down, and we left it behind...
+
+We had by that time reached the narrow strip of wild land which
+separated the English settlements to the south from those of the Russian
+Germans to the north. We came to the church, and like everything else it
+rushed back to the rear; the school on the correction line appeared.
+
+Strangely, school was still on in that yellow building at the corner. I
+noticed a cutter outside, with a man in it, who apparently was waiting
+for his children. This is the fourth of the pictures that stand out in
+my memory. The man looked so forlorn. His horse, a big, hulking farm
+beast, wore a blanket under the harness. I looked at my watch. It was
+twenty-five minutes past four. Here, in the bush country where the
+pioneers carve the farms out of the wilderness, the time kept is often
+oddly at variance with the time of the towns. I looked back several
+times, as long as I could see the building, which was for at least
+another twenty minutes; but school did not close. Still the man sat
+there, humped over, patiently waiting. It is this circumstance, I
+believe, which fixed in my memory the exact hour at which I reached the
+correction line.
+
+Beyond, on the first mile of the last road east there was no possibility
+of going fast. This piece was blown in badly. There was, however, always
+a trail over this mile-long drift. The school, of course, had something
+to do with that. But when you drive four feet above the ground, with
+nothing but uncertain drifts on both sides of the trail, you want to be
+chary of speeding your horses along. One wrong step, and a horse might
+wallow in snow up to his belly, and you would lose more time than you
+could make up for in an hour's breathless career. A horse is afraid,
+too, of trotting there, and it takes a great deal of urging to make him
+do it.
+
+So we lost a little time here; but when a mile or so farther on we
+reached the bush, we made up for it. This last run of five or six miles
+along the correction line consisted of one single, soft, smooth bed of
+snow. The trail was cut in sharply and never drifted. Every successive
+snowfall was at once packed down by the tree-fellers, and whoever drove
+along, could give his horses the lines. I did so, too, and the horses
+ran.
+
+I relaxed. I had done what I could do. Anxiety there was hardly any
+now. A drive over more than forty miles, made at the greatest obtainable
+speed, blunts your emotional energies. I thought of home, to be sure,
+did so all the time; but it was with expectation now, with nothing else.
+Within half an hour I should know...
+
+Then the bush opened up. The last mile led along between snow-buried
+meadows, school and house in plain view ahead. There lay the cottage, as
+peaceful in the evening sun as any house can look. Smoke curled up from
+its chimney and rose in a nearly perpendicular column. I became aware
+of the colder evening air, and with the chill that crept over me I was
+again overwhelmed by the pitifully lonesome looks of the place.
+
+Mostly I shouted when I drew near to tell of my coming. To-day I
+silently swung up through the shrubby thicket in which the cottage and
+the stable behind it lay embedded and turned in to the yard. As soon as
+the horses stopped, I dropped the lines, jerked the door of the cutter
+back, and jumped to the ground.
+
+Then I stood transfixed. That very moment the door of the cottage
+opened. There stood my wife, and between her knee and the door-post a
+curly head pushed through, and a child's voice shouted, "Daddy, come to
+the house! Daddy, come to the house!"
+
+A turn to the better had set in sometime during the morning. The fever
+had dropped, and quickly, as children's illness will come, it had
+gone. But the message had sped on its way, irrevocable and, therefore,
+unrevoked. My wife, when she told me the tale, thought, well had she
+reason to smile, for had I not thus gained an additional holiday?
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN. Skies and Scares
+
+We had a "soft spell" over a week end, and on Monday it had been
+followed by a fearful storm--snowstorm and blizzard, both coming from
+the southeast and lasting their traditional three days before they
+subsided. On Thursday, a report came in that the trail across the wild
+land west of Bell's corner was closed completely--in fact, would be
+impassable for the rest of the winter. This report came with the air
+of authority; the man who brought it knew what he was talking about;
+of that I had no doubt. For the time being, he said, no horses could
+possibly get through.
+
+That very day I happened to meet another man who was habitually driving
+back and forth between the two towns. "Why don't you go west?" he said.
+"You angle over anyway. Go west first and then straight north." And he
+described in detail the few difficulties of the road which he followed
+himself. There was no doubt, he of all men should certainly know which
+was the best road for the first seventeen miles. He had come in from
+that one-third-way town that morning. I knew the trails which he
+described as summer-roads, had gone over them a good many times, though
+never in winter; so, the task of finding the trail should not offer any
+difficulty. Well and good, then; I made up my mind to follow the advice.
+
+On Friday afternoon everything was ready as usual. I rang off at four
+o'clock and stepped into the hall. And right there the first thing went
+wrong.
+
+Never before had I been delayed in my start. But now there stood
+three men in the hall, prominent citizens of the town. I had handed
+my resignation to the school-board; these men came to ask me that I
+reconsider. The board, so I had heard, was going to accept my decision
+and let it go at that. According to this committee the board did not
+represent the majority of the citizens in town. They argued for some
+time against my stubbornness. At last, fretting under the delay, I put
+it bluntly. "I have nothing to reconsider, gentlemen. The matter does
+no longer rest with me. If, as I hear, the board is going to accept my
+resignation, that settles the affair for me. It must of necessity suit
+me or I should not have resigned. But you might see the board. Maybe
+they are making a mistake. In fact, I think so. That is not my business,
+however." And I went.
+
+The time was short enough in any case; this cut it shorter. It was five
+o'clock before I swung out on the western road. I counted on moonlight,
+though, the fickle luminary being in its first quarter. But there were
+clouds in the north and the weather was by no means settled. As for
+my lights, they were useless for driving so long as the ground was
+completely buried under its sheet of snow. On the snow there form no
+shadows by which you can recognize the trail in a light that comes from
+between the two tracks. So I hurried along.
+
+We had not yet made the first three miles, skirting meanwhile the river,
+when the first disaster came. I noticed a rather formidable drift on the
+road straight ahead. I thought I saw a trail leading up over it--I found
+later on that it was a snowshoe trail. I drove briskly up to its very
+edge; then the horses fell into a walk. In a gingerly kind of way we
+started to climb. And suddenly the world seemed to fall to pieces. The
+horses disappeared in the snow, the cutter settled down, there was a
+sharp snap, I fell back--the lines had broken. With lightning quickness
+I reached over the dashboard down to the whiffletrees and unhooked one
+each of the horses' traces. That would release the others, too, should
+they plunge. For the moment I did not know what they were doing. There
+was a cloud of dust dry snow which hid them. Then Peter emerged. I saw
+with horror that he stood on Dan who was lying on his side. Dan started
+to roll over; Peter slipped off to the right. That brought rebellion
+into Dan, for now the neck yoke was cruelly twisting his head. I saw
+Dan's feet emerging out of the snow, pawing the air: he was on his back.
+Everything seemed convulsed. Then Peter plunged and reared, pulling Dan
+half-ways up; that motion of his released the neck yoke from the pole.
+The next moment both horses were on their feet, head by head now, but
+facing each other, apparently trying to pull apart; but the martingales
+held. Then both jumped clear of the cutter and the pole; and they
+plunged out, to the rear, past the cutter, to solid ground.
+
+I do not remember how I got out; but after a minute or so I stood at
+their heads, holding them by the bridles. The knees of both horses
+shook, their nostrils trembled; Peter's eye looked as if he were going
+to bolt. We were only a hundred yards or so from a farm. A man and a
+boy came running with lanterns. I snapped the halter ropes into the bit
+rings and handed the horses over to the boy to be led to and fro at a
+walk so as to prevent a chill; and I went with the man to inspect the
+cutter. Apparently no damage was done beyond the snapping of the lines.
+The man, who knew me, offered to lend me another pair, which I promptly
+accepted. We pulled the cutter out backwards, straightened the harness,
+and hitched the horses up again. It was clear that, though they did not
+seem to be injured, their nerves were on edge.
+
+The farmer meanwhile enlightened me. I mentioned the name of the man
+who had recommended the road. Yes, the road was good enough from town to
+town. This was the only bad drift. Yes, my adviser had passed here the
+day before; but he had turned off the road, going down to the river
+below, which was full of holes, it is true, made by the ice-harvesters,
+but otherwise safe enough. The boy would go along with his lantern to
+guide me to the other side of the drift. I am afraid I thought some
+rather uncharitable things about my adviser for having omitted to
+caution me against this drift. What I minded most, was, of course, the
+delay.
+
+The drift was partly hollow, it appeared; the crust had thawed and
+frozen again; the huge mass of snow underneath had settled down. The
+crust had formed a vault, amply strong enough to carry a man, but not to
+carry horse and cutter.
+
+When in the dying light and by the gleam of the lantern we went through
+the dense brush, down the steep bank, and on to the river, the horses
+were every second ready to bolt. Peter snorted and danced, Dan laid his
+ears back on his head. But the boy gave warning at every open hole, and
+we made it safely. At last we got back to the road, I kept talking and
+purring to the horses for a while, and it seemed they were quieting
+down.
+
+It was not an auspicious beginning for a long night-drive. And though
+for a while all things seemed to be going about as well as I could
+wish, there remained a nervousness which, slight though it seemed while
+unprovoked, yet tinged every motion of the horses and even my own state
+of mind. Still, while we were going west, and later, north into the
+one-third-way town, the drive was one of the most marvellously beautiful
+ones that I had had during that winter of marvellous sights.
+
+As I have mentioned, the moon was in its first quarter and, therefore,
+during the early part of the night high in the sky. It was not very
+cold; the lower air was quiet, of that strange, hushed stillness
+which in southern countries is the stillness of the noon hour in
+midsummer--when Pan is frightened into a panic by the very quiet. It was
+not so, however, in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. It was a night
+of skies, of shifting, ever changing skies. Not for five minutes did an
+aspect last. When I looked up, after maybe having devoted my attention
+for a while to a turn in the road or to a drift, there was no trace left
+of the picture which I had seen last. And you could not help it, the
+sky would draw your eye. There was commotion up there--operations were
+proceeding on a very vast scale, but so silently, with not a whisper of
+wind, that I felt hushed myself.
+
+A few of the aspects have persisted in my memory, but it seems an
+impossible task to sketch them.
+
+I was driving along through open fields. The trail led dimly ahead. Huge
+masses of snow with sharp, immovable shadows flanked it. The horses were
+very wide awake. They cocked their ears at every one of the mounds; and
+sometimes they pressed rump against rump, as if to reassure each other
+by their mutual touch.
+
+About halfway up from the northern horizon there lay a belt of faintest
+luminosity in the atmosphere--no play of northern lights--just an
+impalpable paling of the dark blue sky. There were stars, too, but
+they were not very brilliant. Way down in the north, at the edge of
+the world, there lay a long, low-flung line of cloud, black, scarcely
+discernible in the light of the moon. And from its centre, true north,
+there grew out a monstrous human arm, reaching higher and higher, up to
+the zenith, blotting the stars behind it. It looked at first--in texture
+and rigid outline--as the stream of straw looks that flows from the
+blower of a threshing machine when you stand straight in its line and
+behind it. But, of course, it did not curve down. It seemed to stretch
+and to rise, growing more and more like an arm with a clumsy fist at its
+end, held unconceivably straight and unbending. This cloud, I have no
+doubt, was forming right then by condensation. And it stretched and
+lengthened till it obscured the moon.
+
+Just then I reached the end of my run to the west. I was nearing a block
+of dense poplar bush in which somewhere two farmsteads lay embedded. The
+road turned to the north. I was now exactly south of and in line with
+that long, twenty-mile trail where I had startled horses, rabbit, and
+partridge on the last described drive. I believe I was just twenty-five
+miles from the northern correction line. At this corner where I turned I
+had to devote all my attention to the negotiating of a few bad drifts.
+
+When I looked up again, I was driving along the bottom of a wide road
+gap formed by tall and stately poplars on both sides--trees which stood
+uncannily still. The light of the moon became less dim, and I raised my
+eyes. That band of cloud--for it had turned into a band now, thus losing
+its threatening aspect--had widened out and loosened up. It was a strip
+of flocculent, sheepy-looking, little cloudlets that suggested curliness
+and innocence. And the moon stood in between like a goodnatured shepherd
+in the stories of old.
+
+For a while I kept my eyes on the sky. The going was good indeed on this
+closed-in road. And so I watched that insensible, silent, and yet swift
+shifting of things in the heavens that seemed so orderly, pre-ordained,
+and as if regulated by silent signals. The clouds lost their sheeplike
+look again; they became more massive; they took on more substance and
+spine, more manliness, as it were; and they arranged themselves in
+distinct lines. Soldiers suggested themselves, not soldiers engaged in
+war, but soldiers drilling in times of peace, to be reviewed, maybe, by
+some great general. That central point from which the arm had sprung and
+which had been due north had sidled over to the northwest; the low-flung
+line along the horizon had taken on the shape of a long wedge pointing
+east; farther west it, too, looked more massive now--more like a
+rather solid wall. And all those soldier-clouds fell into a fan-shaped
+formation--into lines radiating from that common central point in the
+northwest. This arrangement I have for many years been calling
+"the tree." It is quite common, of course, and I read it with great
+confidence as meaning "no amount of rain or snow worth mentioning." "The
+tree" covered half the heavens or more, and nowhere did I see any large
+reaches of clear sky. Here and there a star would peep through, and
+the moon seemed to be quickly and quietly moving through the lines.
+Apparently he was the general who reviewed the army.
+
+Again there came a shifting in the scenes. It looked as if some unseen
+hands were spreading a sheet above these flocculent clouds--a thin and
+vapoury sheet that came from the north and gradually covered the whole
+roof of the sky. Stars and moon disappeared; but not, so far, the
+light of the moon; it merely became diffused--the way the light from an
+electric bulb becomes diffused when you enclose it in a frosted globe.
+And then, as the sheet of vapour above began to thicken, the light on
+the snow became dim and dimmer, till the whole of the landscape lay in
+gloom. The sheet still seemed to be coming, coming from the north. But
+no longer did it travel away to the south. It was as if it had brought
+up against an obstacle there, as if it were being held in place. And
+since there was more and more of it pressing up--it seemed rather to be
+pushed now--it telescoped together and threw itself into folds, till
+at last the whole sky looked like an enormous system of parallel
+clothes-lines over all of which one great, soft, and loose cloth
+were flung, so that fold after fold would hang down between all the
+neighbouring pairs of lines; and between two folds there would be a
+sharply converging, upward crease. It being night, this arrangement,
+common in grey daylight, would not have shown at all, had it not been
+for the moon above. As it was, every one of the infolds showed an
+increasingly lighter grey the higher it folded up, and like huge, black
+udders the outfolds were hanging down. This sky, when it persists,
+I have often found to be followed within a few days by heavy storms.
+To-night, however, it did not last. Shifting skies are never certain
+signs, though they normally indicate an unsettled condition of the
+atmosphere. I have observed them after a blizzard, too.
+
+I looked back over my shoulder, just when I emerged from the bush into
+the open fields. And there I became aware of a new element again.
+A quiet and yet very distinct commotion arose from the south. These
+cloth-clouds lifted, and a nearly impalpable change crept over the
+whole of the sky. A few minutes later it crystallised into a distinct
+impression. A dark grey, faintly luminous, inverted bowl stood overhead.
+Not a star was to be seen above, nor yet the moon. But all around the
+horizon there was a nearly clear ring, suffused with the light of the
+moon. There, where the sky is most apt to be dark and hazy, stars peeped
+out--singly and dimly only--I did not recognize any constellation.
+
+And then the grey bowl seemed to contract into patches. Again the
+change seemed to proceed from the south. The clouds seemed to lift still
+higher, and to shrink into small, light, feathery cirrus clouds, silvery
+on the dark blue sky--resembling white pencil shadings. The light of the
+moon asserted itself anew. And this metamorphosis also spread upward,
+till the moon herself looked out again, and it went on spreading
+northward till it covered the whole of the sky.
+
+This last change came just before I had to turn west again for a mile or
+so in order to hit a trail into town. I did not mean to go on straight
+ahead and to cut across those radiating road lines of which I have
+spoken in a former paper. I knew that my wife would be sitting up and
+waiting till midnight or two o'clock, and I wanted to make it. So I
+avoided all risks and gave my attention to the road for a while. I had
+to drive through a ditch and through a fence beyond, and to cross a
+field in order to strike that road which led from the south through the
+park into town. A certain farmstead was my landmark. Beyond it I had to
+watch out sharply if I wanted to find the exact spot where according to
+my informant the wire of the fence had been taken down. I found it.
+
+To cross the field proved to be the hardest task the horses had had so
+far during the night. The trail had been cut in deep through knee-high
+drifts, and it was filled with firmly packed, freshly blown-in snow.
+That makes a particularly bad road for fast driving. I simply had to
+take my time and to give all my attention to the guiding of the horses.
+And here I was also to become aware once more of the fact that my horses
+had not yet forgotten their panic in that river drift of two hours ago.
+There was a strawstack in the centre of the field; at least the shape of
+the big, white mound suggested a strawstack; and the trail led closely
+by it. Sharp shadows showed, and the horses, pricking their ears, began
+to dance and to sidle away from it as we passed along its southern edge.
+
+But we made it. By the time we reached the park that forms the approach
+to the town from the south, the skies had changed completely. There
+was now, as far as my eye would reach, just one vast, dark-blue,
+star-spangled expanse. And the skies twinkled and blazed down upon the
+earth with a veritable fervour. There was not one of the more familiar
+stars that did not stand out brightly, even the minor ones which you do
+not ordinarily see oftener than, maybe, once or twice a year--as, for
+instance, Vega's smaller companions in the constellation of the Lyre, or
+the minor points in the cluster of the Pleiades.
+
+I sometimes think that the mere fact of your being on a narrow
+bush-road, with the trees looming darkly to both sides, makes the stars
+seem brighter than they appear from the open fields. I have heard that
+you can see a star even in daytime from the bottom of a deep mine-pit if
+it happens to pass overhead. That would seem to make my impression less
+improbable, perhaps. I know that not often have the stars seemed so much
+alive to me as they did that night in the park.
+
+And then I came into the town. I stayed about forty-five minutes, fed
+the horses, had supper myself, and hitched up again.
+
+On leaving town I went for another mile east in the shelter of a fringe
+of bush; and this bush kept rustling as if a breeze had sprung up. But
+it was not till I turned north again, on the twenty-mile stretch, that I
+became conscious of a great change in the atmosphere. There was indeed a
+slight breeze, coming from the north, and it felt very moist. Somehow it
+felt homely and human, this breeze. There was a promise in it, as of a
+time, not too far distant, when the sap would rise again in the trees
+and when tender leaflets would begin to stir in delicate buds. So far,
+however, its more immediate promise probably was snow.
+
+But it did not last, either. A colder breeze sprang up. Between the two
+there was a distinct lull. And again there arose in the north, far away,
+at the very end of my seemingly endless road, a cloud-bank. The colder
+wind that sprang up was gusty; it came in fits and starts, with short
+lulls in between; it still had that water-laden feeling, but it was now
+what you would call "damp" rather than "moist"--the way you often feel
+winter-winds along the shores of great lakes or along sea-coasts. There
+was a cutting edge to it--it was "raw" And it had not been blowing very
+long before low-hanging, dark, and formless cloud-masses began to scud
+up from the north to the zenith. The northern lights, too, made their
+appearance again about that time. They formed an arc very far to the
+south, vaulting up behind my back, beyond the zenith. No streamers in
+them, no filtered rays and streaks--nothing but a blurred luminosity
+high above the clouds and--so it seemed--above the atmosphere. The
+northern lights have moods, like the clouds--moods as varied as
+theirs--though they do not display them so often nor quite so
+ostentatiously.
+
+We were nearing the bridge across the infant river. The road from the
+south slopes down to this bridge in a rather sudden, s-shaped curve,
+as perhaps the reader remembers. I still had the moonlight from time to
+time, and whenever one of the clouds floated in front of the crescent,
+I drove more slowly and more carefully. Now there is a peculiar thing
+about moonlight on snow. With a fairly well-marked trail on bare ground,
+in summertime, a very little of it will suffice to indicate the road,
+for there are enough rough spots on the best of trails to cast little
+shadows, and grass and weeds on both sides usually mark the beaten track
+off still more clearly, even though the road lead north. But the snow
+forms such an even expanse, and the trail on it is so featureless
+that these signs are no longer available. The light itself also is too
+characterless and too white and too nearly of the same quality as the
+light reflected by the snow to allow of judging distances delicately and
+accurately. You seem to see nothing but one vast whiteness all around.
+When you drive east or west, the smooth edges of the tracks will cast
+sharply defined shadows to the north, but when you drive north or south,
+even these shadows are absent, and so you must entirely rely on your
+horses to stay on the trail. I have often observed how easily my own
+judgment was deluded.
+
+But still I felt so absolutely sure that I should know when I approached
+the bridge that, perhaps through overconfidence, I was caught napping.
+There was another fact which I did not take sufficiently into account at
+the time. I have mentioned that we had had a "soft spell." In fact, it
+had been so warm for a day or two that the older snow had completely
+iced over. Now, much as I thought I was watching out, we were suddenly
+and quite unexpectedly right on the downward slope before I even
+realized that we were near it.
+
+As I said, on this slope the trail described a double curve, and it hit
+the bridge at an angle from the west. The first turn and the behaviour
+of the horses were what convinced me that I had inadvertently gone too
+far. If I had stopped the horses at the point where the slope began and
+then started them downward at a slow walk, we should still have reached
+the bridge at too great a speed; for the slope had offered the last big
+wind from the north a sheer brow, and it was swept clean of new snow,
+thus exposing the smooth ice underneath; the snow that had drifted from
+the south, on the other hand, had been thrown beyond the river, on
+to the lower northern bank; the horses skidded, and the weight of the
+cutter would have pushed them forward. As it was, they realized the
+danger themselves; for when we turned the second curve, both of them
+stiffened their legs and spread their feet in order to break the
+momentum of the cutter; but in spite of the heavy calks under their
+shoes they slipped on all fours, hardly able to make the bend on to the
+bridge.
+
+They had to turn nearly at right angles to their last direction, and
+the bridge seemed to be one smooth sheet of ice. The moon shone brightly
+just then; so I saw exactly what happened. As soon as the runners
+hit the iced-over planks, the cutter swung out sideways; the horses,
+however, slipping and recovering, managed to make the turn. It was a
+worth-while sight to see them strike their calks into the ice and brace
+themselves against the shock which they clearly expected when the cutter
+started to skid. The latter swung clear of the bridge--you will remember
+that the railing on the east-side was broken away--out into space, and
+came down with a fearful crash, but right side up, on the steep north
+bank of the river--just at the very moment when the horses reached the
+deep, loose snow beyond which at least gave them a secure footing. They
+had gone along the diagonal of the bridge, from the southwest corner,
+barely clearing the rail, to the northwest corner where the snow had
+piled in to a depth of from two to five feet on the sloping bank. If
+the ground where I hit the bank had been bare, the cutter would have
+splintered to pieces; as it was, the shock of it seemed to jar every
+bone in my body.
+
+It seemed rather a piece of good luck that the horses bolted; the lines
+held; they pulled me free of the drift on the bank and plunged out on
+the road. For a mile or two we had a pretty wild run; and this time
+there was no doubt about it, either, the horses were thoroughly
+frightened. They ran till they were exhausted, and there was no holding
+them; but since I was on a clear road, I did not worry very much.
+Nevertheless, I was rather badly shaken up myself; and if I had followed
+the good advice that suggested itself, I should have put in for some
+time at the very next farm which I passed. The way I see things now,
+it was anything rather than safe to go on. With horses in the nervous
+condition in which mine were I could not hope any longer to keep them
+under control should a further accident happen. But I had never yet
+given in when I had made up my mind to make the trip, and it was hard to
+do so for the first time.
+
+As soon as I had the horses sufficiently in hand again, I lighted my
+lantern, got out on the road, and carefully looked my cutter over. I
+found that the hardwood lining of both runners was broken at the curve,
+but the steel shoes were, though slightly bent, still sound. Fortunately
+the top had been down, otherwise further damage would have been sure to
+result. I saw no reason to discontinue the drive.
+
+Now after a while--when the nervousness incident upon the shock which
+I had received subsided--my interest in the shifting skies revived once
+more, and again I began to watch the clouds. The wind was squally, and
+the low, black vapour-masses overhead had coalesced into a vast array of
+very similar but yet distinct groups. There was still a certain amount
+of light from the moon, but only just enough to show the texture and the
+grouping of the clouds. Hardly ever had I seen, or at least consciously
+taken note of a sky that with its blackness and its massed multitudes of
+clouds looked so threatening, so sinister, so much like a battle-array.
+But way up in the northeast there were two large areas quite suffused
+with light from the north. They must have been thin cloud-layers in
+whose upper reaches the northern lights were playing. And these patches
+of light were like a promise, like a word of peace arresting the battle.
+Had it not been for these islands of light, I should have felt depressed
+when I looked back to the road.
+
+We were swinging along as before. I had rested the horses by a walk,
+and to a casual observer they would have seemed to be none the worse
+for their fling at running away. But on closer scrutiny they would again
+have revealed the unmistakable signs of nervous tension. Their ears
+moved jerkily on the slightest provocation. Still, the road was good and
+clear, and I had no apprehensions.
+
+Then came the sudden end of the trail. It was right in front of a farm
+yard. Clearly, the farmer had broken the last part of the road over
+which I had come. The trail widened out to a large, circus-shaped flat
+in the drifts. The snow had the ruffled appearance of being thoroughly
+tramped down by a herd of cattle. On both sides there were trees--wild
+trees--a-plenty. Brush lined the narrow road gap ahead; but the snow had
+piled in level with its tops. This had always been rather a bad spot,
+though the last time I had seen it the snow had settled down to about
+half the height of the shrubs. I stopped and hesitated for a moment. I
+knew just where the trail had been. It was about twenty-five feet from
+the fence of the field to the east. It was now covered under three to
+four feet of freshly drifted-in snow. The drift seemed to be higher
+towards the west, where the brush stood higher, too. So I decided to
+stay as nearly as I could above the old trail. There, even though we
+might break through the new snow the older drifts underneath were likely
+to be firm enough.
+
+We went ahead. The drift held, and slowly we climbed to its summit. It
+is a strange coincidence that just then I should have glanced up at the
+sky. I saw a huge, black cloud-mass elbowing its way, as it were, in
+front of those islands of light, the promise of peace. And so much was
+I by this time imbued with the moods of the skies that the disappearance
+of this mild glimmer sent a regret through my very body. And
+simultaneously with this thrill of regret there came--I remember this
+as distinctly as if it had been an hour ago--the certainty of impending
+disaster. The very next moment chaos reigned. The horses broke in, not
+badly at all; but as a consequence of their nervous condition they flew
+into a panic. I held them tight as they started to plunge. But there
+was no guiding them; they were bound to have things their own way
+altogether. It seemed as if they had lost their road-sense, too, for
+instead of plunging at least straight ahead, out on the level trail,
+they made, with irresistible bounds and without paying the slightest
+attention to the pull of the lines, towards the east. There the drift,
+not being packed by any previous traffic, went entirely to pieces under
+their feet. I had meanwhile thrown off my robes, determined at all costs
+to bring them to a stop, for I knew, if I allowed them to get away with
+me this time, they would be spoiled for any further drives of mine.
+
+Now just the very fraction of a second when I got my feet up against the
+dashboard so as to throw my whole weight into my pull, they reared up
+as if for one tremendous and supreme bound, and simultaneously I saw a
+fence post straight under the cutter pole. Before I quite realized it,
+the horses had already cleared the fence. I expected the collision, the
+breaking of the drawbar and the bolting of the horses; but just then
+my desperate effort in holding them told, and dancing and fretting
+they stood. Then, in a flash, I mentally saw and understood the whole
+situation. The runners of the cutter, still held up by the snow of the
+drift which sloped down into the field and which the horses had churned
+into slabs and clods, had struck the fence wire and, lifting the whole
+of the conveyance, had placed me; cutter and all, balanced for a moment
+to a nicety, on top of the post. But already we began to settle back.
+
+I felt that I could not delay, for a moment later the runners would slip
+off the wire and the cutter fall backward; that was the certain signal
+for the horses to bolt. The very paradoxicality of the situation seemed
+to give me a clue. I clicked my tongue and, holding the horses back with
+my last ounce of strength, made them slowly dance forward and pull me
+over the fence. In a moment I realized that I had made a mistake. A
+quick pull would have jerked me clear of the post. As it was, it slowly
+grated along the bottom of the box; then the cutter tilted forward, and
+when the runners slipped off the wire, the cutter with myself pitched
+back with a frightful knock against the post. The back panel of the box
+still shows the splintered tear that fence post made. The shock of it
+threw me forward, for a second I lost all purchase on the lines, and
+again the horses went off in a panic. It was quite dark now, for the
+clouds were thickening in the sky. While I attended to the horses, I
+reflected that probably something had broken back there in the cutter,
+but worst of all, I realized that this incident, for the time being
+at least, had completely broken my nerve. As soon as I had brought the
+horses to a stop, I turned in the knee-deep snow of the field and made
+for the fence.
+
+Half a mile ahead there gleamed a light. I had, of course, to stay on
+the field, and I drove along, slowly and carefully, skirting the fence
+and watching it as closely as what light there was permitted.
+
+I do not know why this incident affected me the way it did; but I
+presume that the cumulative effect of three mishaps, one following the
+other, had something to do with it; the same as it affected the horses.
+But more than that, I believe, it was the effect of the skies. I am
+rather subject to the influence of atmospheric conditions. There are not
+many things that I would rather watch. No matter what the aspect of the
+skies may be, they fascinate me. I have heard people say, "What a dull
+day!"--or, "What a sleepy day!"--and that when I was enjoying my own
+little paradise in yielding to the moods of cloud and sky. To this very
+hour I am convinced that the skies broke my nerve that night, that those
+incidents merely furnished them with an opportunity to get their work in
+more tellingly.
+
+Of the remainder of the drive little needs to be said. I found a way out
+of the field, back to the road, drove into the yard of the farm where I
+had seen the light, knocked at the house, and asked for and obtained the
+night's accommodation for myself and for my horses.
+
+At six o'clock next morning I was on the road again. Both I and the
+horses had shaken off the nightmare, and through a sprinkling, dusting
+fall of snow we made the correction line and finally home in the best of
+moods and conditions.
+
+
+END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Over Prairie Trails, by Frederick Philip Grove
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OVER PRAIRIE TRAILS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 6111.txt or 6111.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/6/1/1/6111/
+
+Produced by Gardner Buchanan
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.