Chapter V: Part 5

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...