WINTER AND SPRING
Snow came as it comes to us in the Northland—a blinding fall, heavy and monotonous—and in forty-eight hours the Johnstown Road was blocked.
Followed a day of dazzling sunshine and intense cold, which set our timbers cracking; and the snow, like finest flour, creaked under our snow-shoes.
All the universe had turned to blue and silver; and the Vlaie Water ran fathomless purple between its unstained snows. But that night the clouds returned and winds grew warmer, and soon the skies opened with feathery white volleys, and the big, thick flakes stormed down again, obliterating alike the work of nature and of man.
Summer House was covered to the veranda eaves. We made shovels and cleared the roofs and broke paths to stable and well.
Here, between dazzling ramparts, we lived and moved and had our being, week after week; and every new snow-storm piled higher our palisades and buried the whole land under one vast white pall.
Vlaie Water froze three feet solid; fierce winds piled the ice with gigantic drifts so that no man could mark the course of the creeks any more; and a vast white desolation stretched away to the mountains, broken only by naked hard-wood forests or by the interminable ocean of the pines weighted deep with snow.
Only when a crust came were we at any pains to set a watch against a war party from the Canadas. But none arrived; no signal smoke stained the peaks; nothing living stirred on that dead white waste save those little grey and whining birds which creep all day up and down tree-trunks, or a sudden gusty flight of snow-birds, which suddenly arrive from nowhere and are gone as suddenly.
Once a white owl with yellow eyes sat upon the ridge-pole of our barn; but our pullets were safe within, and Penelope drove him away with snowballs.
The deer yarded on Maxon; lynx-tracks circled our house and barn, and we sometimes heard old tassel-ears a-miauling on the Stacking Ridge.