The next day Donald went to Vancouver. He scanned the registers in hotels, inquired at docks and depots, but no trace of the Wainwrights could he find. He walked the streets with a forlorn hope that he might meet them. The hearts of many slender golden-haired girls were set fluttering that day as a tall, handsome young man subjected them to close scrutiny.
Two days later he returned to the lake. That night he switched off the light and sat by the open window looking out on a night of stars, with a new moon making a ghostly light on the lake. An owl’s mournful hoot was answered by the uncanny cry of a heron. The faint sighing sound of streams in distant gorges became a haunting chorus to this duet. He thought of Connie’s cabin up the mountain, now cold and dark. How he would miss her! What an idiot he had been not to have known long ago that he loved her. He knew now that he had loved her from the first. Dear little Connie!
Donald walked the floor until midnight. Once in bed, he tossed restlessly until the early morning, then fell into a fitful sleep in which he dreamed of a small, winsome face and big blue eyes surrounded by a wealth of golden hair.
September with its days of mellow sunshine passed. October brought heavy hoar frosts that covered the earth with a robe of diamonds, and formed ice in the small pools and marshes. Winter comes early in the mountains. In mid-winter the valleys between the peaks of the Coast Range will have five feet of snow when, a few hundred feet below, where the warm waters of the Pacific lap the gentle slopes, the grass is green and there is none of the chilly whiteness that mantles the towering hills above.
There came a day in November when the air held a solemn stillness. The firs and pines pointed straight to the sky without a quiver in their branches. The brown earth seemed to say, “I am ready.” The cry of the loon in it had a dreary sound, a note which seemed to say that winter was coming. Squirrels working in the tops of big pines increased their efforts. The cones, nipped off by their sharp teeth fell pattering to the ground, to be garnered by these busy little workers and secreted in their nests in hollow trees. The bear of the hillsides ate the frozen berry or the pulp of rotten log to cleanse its stomach before starting its long winter sleep in windfall or cave. Thus does Nature give to the wild things of the forest an instinct unknown to man.
The rush of wings sounded high in air as wild ducks passed in swift flight on their yearly pilgrimage to the south. Occasionally a flock would lower in gradually narrowing circles to land with a splash in the restful waters of the lake, then to stretch tired wings, the while bobbing their heads and quacking contentedly. Flocks of geese passed in wedge-shaped formation, their honking coming faintly from a dizzy height. A flock of Arctic swans, skimming so low that the crisp rustle of their wings could be heard, landed in the centre of the lake with a great commotion. There with their beautiful necks proudly arched they floated like white ghosts throughout the night. The red and yellow leaves, like gaudy curtains draped the deciduous trees. The wild crab-apple and high-bush cranberry hung frozen on the naked branches. The sun was surrounded by a ring and shone weakly through a misty haze. The unmistakable breath of the north wind was in the air.
Old John took his traps down from the loft and oiled them. A patch was found needed on a worn moccasin, and new laces were inserted in his snowshoes. “Winter’s comin’, ol’ timer, and we’re goin’ to have a heavy fall of snow,” he mused to himself. For two days Nature gave warning, then on the second night the storm came.
A roaring wind came bellowing from the north, lashing the waters of the lake to foam, tearing at Donald’s cabin with the strength of invisible giant hands, and howling through the forest with shrieking wails. Gust came upon gust with increasing strength, and in the short lulls could be heard the swish of the sleety snow against the windows.
The big trees creaked as they swayed in the gale, and with a loud groan, as if in mortal pain, a huge forest monarch, as its roots gave way, fell crushing down the smaller trees to smite the earth with a resounding crash.
The wind went down through the night, but the snow fell steadily. When Donald opened his door next morning he looked out on a new world. The wizardry of frost and snow had given the earth a blanket of white that was eye-blinding in its brilliancy under the bright morning sun. The keen frost had locked the lake tight under a coating of clear ice.