After that, it would take the sunshine and warm south wind at least two or three years to melt the mass, while thousands of people would be in mourning for their dead children and kinsfolk. Or, reduced to beggary, they would bewail the loss of all they had in this world. To hear the old Frost King, as his tongue wagged, and the icicles of his beard flopped up and down, as the chief chin-chopper of the party, you would have thought that this baby avalanche, that was to start today was the greatest and most famous ever known.
“Now watch,” said the Frost King.
It was midday in midsummer, and the heat was great, as he took up a mass of wet snow, hardly more than a dipper full, but already made soft by the sun’s rays. He squeezed the mass hard, between the palms of his hands. To the Frost Giants, it seemed scarcely bigger than a pill.
Then, striking an attitude, like a baseball pitcher, or a man playing tenpins, and about to roll the ball along down the alley, the Frost King held up before them the dark gray, sticky ball. As he fondled and patted it, as his own child, the Frost King called out, “I name thee, my son, ‘Soaker Smash-All,’ and I expect thee to break all records. Make the widest swathe of ruin, my son, ever known among men. The sun is [[44]]mine enemy, and, through thee, I shall spoil his work and give him plenty of labor to restore it. Go!”
Saying this, the toss was made and the ball set rolling.
At first, for several seconds, with Soaker Smash-All, it was more like ploughing, than rolling its way through the drifts, for the slope was slight. Then, as the incline grew more steep, the tumbling became more rapid, until about a half mile from the starting point, the baby avalanche had, by its leaps and bounds grown so fast, as to be already as big as a barn. It was bouncing swiftly along, when, instead of going straight ahead, as its daddy, the Frost King, had planned and expected, it rolled against a rounded rock, that curved up and backwards, like the dashboard of a sleigh, or the roof of a pagoda.
At once, it swerved to the right and bounded high up in the air, as though some Frost Giant was playing foot ball, and was trying to hit the goal.
Then all sorts of funny things began to happen.
The Frost Giants were terribly disappointed at seeing their pet mount up in the air like a pigskin ball from the foot of a first class kicker, even before it was half grown. To behave so differently, from what its daddy had felt sure of, [[45]]and told the Frost Giants it would do, seemed like disobedience. For, was not this avalanche the Frost King’s son? Instead of rolling straight down the valley, gathering force for its final plunge, at every yard, it was apparently trying to climb up to the moon.
“That youngster is altogether too smart,” whispered one old giant to another.