Madge looked up and the world seemed to assume a wondrous new beauty such as she had never known. The blue above was wonderfully clear and bright. Over the snow the sunlight was beating strongly, though it appeared to give little or no heat. Yet in the great patches of shadow through which they passed at times it felt colder still.
“Yoost keep on feelin’ yer nose,” Stefan told her, as the dogs rested for a moment at the top of a small hill. “You mustn’t let it get frost-bited, ma’am. It ain’t such a awful big nose you got, leddy, but you sure vouldn’t look so bretty if it drop off. Ha, ha!”
He laughed out loudly, apparently enjoying his ponderous joke greatly, but she felt that she must heed his advice and frequently carried the big mitt Mrs. Olsen had lent her to her face. They came to a great expanse of deep forest where, in places, the ground was 91 nearly bare of snow. The pulling was hard here and the dogs toiled along more slowly and panted as their cloudy breaths rose in steamy puffs. Madge admired them. They seemed such strong, willing animals. When they rested for a moment they would lie down and bite off the little balls of ice that formed beneath their toes, but at a word they would leap up again and throw themselves against their breast-bands, eagerly. In one difficult place Madge protested.
“The poor things are working so hard,” she said. “Couldn’t I get out and walk for a while? I don’t feel tired at all now, but your poor dogs do, I’m sure.”
“No, ma’am,” replied Stefan. “They ain’t tired. They yoost look so because they work hard. In dis country togs and men has to work hard or go hoongry. In a moment you sees how dey run again, vhen dey get good going. Dem togs can go dis vay all day and be fresh again to-morrow. Eferybody here knows vhat my team o’ togs can do, ma’am.”
It was evident that he was proud of them, and Madge decided that it was with good reason. They had started again and reached an expanse of burnt land, upon which the snow was crusted and the road was on a down grade. The team that had panted so hard, 92 with lolling tongues, threw itself into the collars and trotted off again, briskly, while Stefan followed with the short-stepped and effortless flat-footed run that covers so much ground in the north. The girl had to balance herself rather carefully at times, for the surface was by no means a level one. The toboggan swayed and bumped over hidden things that may have been stumps or rocks, or great buried ruts of the previous fall.
It was all so new and wonderful! A sense of enjoyment actually stole over her. But for the feeling of stiffness in her face she felt comfortably warm. Without ever meeting a soul, through a country that seemed utterly deserted of man, they went on for several miles. Once Stefan stopped the toboggan in order to show her tracks of a bear. It was wonderful to think that such animals roamed about her. The Swede told her that they were utterly harmless, that they always fled as soon as their keen eyes or sharp ears revealed the neighborhood of their enemies, the men who coveted their thick and long-haired hides worth a good many dollars. But she saw few living things; once there was a great snowy owl that rose heavily and then flew swiftly and in silence from a stump in a brulé, disappearing among the trees like an animated shadow, 93 yes, a shadow of sudden death to hares and partridges cowering beneath the fronds of wide-spreading conifers or in the great tangles of frost-killed long grasses.
It was altogether another world, strange and of rugged beauty. She felt as if she had been transported from the seething city into the vast peace of some landscape of moon or stars. Every bit of the old harsh world was now left behind and there was no longer any hint of cruelty in the snowy plains and hills and forest; nothing reminded her of despairing hunger, of the disbelief that had stolen upon her in the possibility of eking out much longer a life that was too hard to sustain. What if her errand seemed fantastic, unreal, since this new world also was like some illusion of a dream? The great stillness appeared to be friendly––the bent tops of snow-laden trees surely bowed a welcome to her––the shining sun and the pure air, in spite of bitter cold, drove the blood more rapidly through her veins and she no longer deemed life to be a mere form of suffering, such as she had undergone during the last year of her losing contest in the cruel, pitiless town.
Suddenly, as Stefan trudged behind in a narrow part of the old tote-road, a big white hare crossed the path ahead of the dogs, perhaps 94 seeking to escape the pursuit of some marten or weasel. At once the team broke into a headlong gallop, a helter-skelter pursuit, while their master roared at them unavailingly. Down a small declivity they flew. A moment later one side of the toboggan rose suddenly and the passenger felt herself being shot off into the snow. As the sled upset the little trunk lashed to its back caught into something and firmly anchored the whole contrivance, a few yards further on, and perforce the animals stopped with hanging tongues and steaming breaths.
An instant later Stefan was helping Madge arise. He looked at her in deep concern.