d up and selected the exact spot
where to tackle it. Later, I knew, this drift would be harmless enough;
there was sufficient local traffic here to establish a well-packed
trail. At present, however, it still seemed a formidable task for a team
that was to pull me over thirty-three miles more. Besides it was a first
test for my horses; I did not know yet how they would behave in snow.

But we went at it. For a moment things happened too fast for me to watch
details. The horses plunged wildly and reared on their hind feet in
a panic, straining against each other, pulling apart, going down
underneath the pole, trying to turn and retrace their steps. And
meanwhile the cutter went sharply up at first, as if on the crest of a
wave, then toppled over into a hole made by Dan, and altogether behaved
like a boat tossed on a stormy sea. Then order returned into the chaos.
I had the lines short, wrapped double and treble around my wrists;
my feet stood braced in the corner of the box, knees touching the
dashboard; my robes slipped down. I spoke to the horses in a soft,
quiet, purring voice; and at last I pulled in. Peter hated to stand.
I held him. Then I looked back. This first wild plunge had taken us a
matter of two hundred yards into the drift. Peter pulled and champed at
the bit; the horses were sinking nearly out of sight. But I knew that
many and many a time in the future I should have to go through just this
and that from the beginning I must train the horses to tackle it right.
So, in spite of my aching wrists I kept them standing till I thought
that they were fully breathed. Then I relaxed my pull the slightest bit
and clicked my tongue. "Good," I thought, "they are pulling together!"
And I managed to hold them in line. They reared and plunged again like
drowning things in their last agony, but they no longer clashed against
nor pulled away from each other. I measured the distance with my eye.
Another two hundred yards or thereabout, and I pulled them in again.
Thus we stopped altogether four times. The horses were steaming when we
got through this drift which was exactly half a mile long; my cutter was
packed level full with slabs and clods of snow; and I was pretty well
exhausted myself.

"If there is very much of this," I thought for the moment, "I may not be
able to make it." But then I knew that a north-south road will drift in
badly only under exceptional circumstances. It is the east-west grades
that are most apt