Chapter Twenty Nine.
The Fight ’twixt Winter and Spring—A Never-to-be-Forgotten Evening—Attacked by Northern indians—The Fire.
Would Springtime never come again?
We had expected it weeks ago. The birds and beasts in the forest had expected it too. The former had commenced to sing, the latter had grown unusually active; guanacos had been in search of tender herbage, pumas had been in search of the guanacos. Hungry, lank, dismal-eyed foxes had come down to stare at the toldos when the dogs were eating; and even the armadillos had unrolled themselves from cosy caves and corners, and crawled at night towards the encampment.
Then the new snowstorm had come on all so suddenly too.
The denizens of the woods had taken shelter under the trees; in some of these the branches, snow-laden, had dropped groundward, forming quite a series of tents in the forest. In these the Indians had found whole colonies of great gawky-looking ostriches, and had made a harvest in feathers.
Lawlor, wading through the snow one day, and peeping in under the trees, came face to face with a puma. It would have gone hard with him had not Ritchie, rifle in hand, been close alongside and shot the huge beast while it was in the very act of springing.
But the dreary season came to an end at last, and the snow began to melt and to fly away. Then winter and spring seemed to fight together for the mastery. Winter riding on the wings of a fierce west wind that roared harshly through the woods and bent the trees before it. Winter driving before him battalions of threatening clouds, white, grey, and black, and trying to blot out the sun. Frost, with his crystal cohorts, struggling for every inch of ground, fighting for the lake of the plains, which had succumbed to the last terrible storm and was hardened over; fighting for the streams, the rapids, the cataracts.
The sun, in all his beauty and splendour, shooting out every now and then into the rifts of blue, and sending his darts groundwards at every unprotected spot, each ray a ray of hope for the long-enslaved earth. Sunshine glittering on the leaves of evergreen shrubs, shining on the needles of pines, and adorning every budding twig with radiant dew-drops, that erst were crystals of ice.