f ice, and not snow at all, as we know it in the
East, little sharp-angled diamond-points that stung the skin like fire.
It came in almost horizontal lines, driving flat across the unbroken
prairie and defying anything made of God or man to stop it. Nothing did
stop it. Our shack and the bunk-house and stables and hay-stacks tore a
few pin-feathers off its breast, though; and those few feathers are
drifts higher than my head, heaped up against each and all of the
buildings.

I scratched the frost off a window-pane, where feathery little drifts
were seeping in through the sill-cracks, when it first began. But the
wind blew harder and harder and the shack rocked and shook with the
tension. Oh, such a wind! It made a whining and wailing noise, with each
note higher, and when you felt that it couldn't possibly increase, that
it simply _must_ ease off, or the whole world would go smash, why, that
whining note merely grew tenser and the wind grew stronger. How it
lashed things! How it shook and flailed and trampled this poor old earth
of ours! Just before supper Olie announced that he'd look after my
chicks for me. I told him, quite casually, that I'd attend to them
myself. I usually strew a mixture of wheat and oats on the litter in the
hen-house overnight. This had two advantages, one was that it didn't
take me out quite so early in the morning, and the other was that the
chicks themselves started scratching around first thing in the morning
and so got exercise and kept themselves warmer-bodied and in better
health.

It was not essential that I should go to the hen-house myself, but I was
possessed with a sudden desire to face that singing white tornado. So I
put on my things, while Dinky-Dunk was at work in the stables. I put on
furs and leggings and gauntlets and all, as though I were starting for a
ninety-mile drive, and slipped out. Dinky-Dunk had tunneled through the
drift in front of the door, but that tunnel was already beginning to
fill again. I plowed through it, and tried to look about me. Everything
was a sort of streaked misty gray, an all-enveloping muffing leaden
maelstrom that hurt your skin when you lifted your head and tried to
look it in the face. Once, in a lull of the wind when the snow was not
so thick, I caught sight of the hay-stacks. That gave me a line on the
hen-house. So I made for it, on the run, holding my head low as I went.

It was glorious, at first, it made my lungs pump and my blood race