One day—or night, was it?—Patch and I were up the creek some miles. I had my gun with me, for I had the day before noticed traces of what I thought were wolves, and I did not care to be confronted with them unprepared.
I was standing in an open space, clear of trees, on the surface of the frozen stream indeed, when I was more than usually struck with the sublime, the awful spectacle which the heavens exhibited.
These magnificent displays of the aurora borealis always affected me; but this night they were particularly grand, and I stood some time, as there was not a breath of wind stirring, admiring them, and wondering.
Streamers, tongues of rose-tinted lurid fire, slowly crept up from the mysterious north. Sometimes they stopped, hesitated, then darting on again, covered the entire heavens. Often they resembled huge flames of crimson fire; they flickered and seemed often to be enshrouded in dense, yet transparent, smoke. Frequently they whirled and twirled as if they had been spindles.
Now these appearances were here, now there. They never remained stationary; the whole firmament was in motion always.
The snow and all the earth and trees were blood-coloured, my breath and the dog's was red too, and awful. There was a certain feeling of suffocation in the atmosphere, or so I imagined. The cold was indescribable; inhaling felt like drawing into one's throat the fumes of cayenne pepper. My heart beat violently, I breathed in gasps, and I knew that if a wind arose I should be shrivelled up as feathers would be in a fire.
But I also knew that Providence had decreed that when cold has become so intense, as it was then, wind shall not blow; therefore, I dismissed this dread.
At times the heavens were suffused with deepest crimson, then bars of glowing scarlet would undulate across them; or it would be checkered with different tints of orange purple and deep green.
And suddenly all these colours vanished, and the sky was covered with what looked like luminous clouds, through which moved shapes of wavy light, forms which could be likened to angels or spirits. They arose from the northern horizon, climbed slowly to the zenith, then with a burst of brilliance they slipped out of sight. It seemed to me that hundreds, thousands of them were up there moving, twining, turning amongst themselves, like sentient beings, through all the vast space above me.
These forms, wrapped in robes of diaphanous, tremulous light, sometimes appeared as if they were about to leave the sky and wrap me about in fleecy raiment, and I caught myself imagining that they would carry me away beyond those snow-clad mountains to the north, to the spot which all men seek, but which none have yet reached. I was spellbound, dazzled by this sublime exhibition of Almighty power. I was not afraid—not really; I was awestruck, solemnised.