ch a high crest wave
had suddenly been frozen into solidity, its outline would have mimicked
to perfection many a one of the snow shapes that I saw around.

Once the horses had really learned to pull exactly together--and they
learned it thoroughly here--our progress was not too bad. Of course, it
was not like going on a grade, be it ever so badly drifted in. Here
the ground underneath, too, was uneven and overgrown with a veritable
entanglement of brush in which often the horses' feet would get caught.
As for the road, there was none left, nothing that even by the boldest
stretch of imagination could have been considered even as the slightest
indication of one. And worst of all, I knew positively that there would
be no trail at any time during the winter. I was well aware of the fact
that, after it once snowed up, nobody ever crossed this waste between
the "half way farms" and the "White Range Line House." This morning it
took me two and a half solid hours to make four miles.

But the ordeal had its reward. Here where the fact that there was snow
on the ground, and plenty of it, did no longer need to be sunk into my
brain--as soon as it had lost its value as a piece of news and a lesson,
I began to enjoy it just as the hunter in India will enjoy the battle of
wits when he is pitted against a yellow-black tiger. I began to catch on
to the ways of this snow; I began, as it were, to study the mentality of
my enemy. Though I never kill, I am after all something of a sportsman.
And still another thing gave me back that mental equilibrium which you
need in order to see things and to reason calmly about them. Every dash
of two hundred yards or so brought me that much nearer to my goal. Up to
the "half way farms" I had, as it were, been working uphill: there was
more ahead than behind. This was now reversed: there was more behind
than ahead, and as yet I did not worry about the return trip.

Now I have already said that snow is the only really plastic element in
which the wind can carve the vagaries of its mood and leave a record of
at least some permanency. The surface of the sea is a wonderful book to
be read with a lightning-quick eye; I do not know anything better to
do as a cure for ragged nerves--provided you are a good sailor. But the
forms are too fleeting, they change too quickly--so quickly, indeed,
that I have never succeeded in so fixing their record upon my memory as
to be able to develop one form from the other