n to fall in small, hard flakes almost congealed to hail. Then,
the three days gone, the wind died down suddenly, the flakes grew
larger, softer, the snow clung tenaciously to the trees and fences and
eaves of house and stable. Jim in arctic shoes and mittens, his ears
lost under the flaps of his cap, having sighed and bestirred himself
from his snug comfort by Julia's stove, got his shovel and went up on
the housetop.

While the bleak, chill days rushed by Wanda prepared happily for the
fine weather which would come, when the sun reflected back from many
feet of fluffy snow would warm the air, when in the high, dry altitudes
the sparkling, Christmassy world would become a rarely beautiful thing,
when she could leave the house and penetrate deep into a solitude which
was as different from the solitude of the summer forestland as day is
from night. She brought down from the attic her own favourite pair of
skis and saw that they were fit. The long slender bits of pine, light
and graceful with their running grooves glistening, their turned up
ends like Turks' slippers, she stood on end in the living room while
she gave them a new coat of white shellac. Her snowshoe pole she
tested, making sure that it had sustained no injury during its long
banishment to the dark places of the attic, and that it could be
trusted in the work she would call upon it to do. She gathered the
winter out-door things which she had not used for two years, the white
sweater that clung close to her slim, pliant body; the white tasseled
hat, mitts, leggins, white bloomers. And then, when a blue and white,
laughing day came, and the air was clear and warm, the branches of the
trees sagging under their diamond pricked festoons of snow, she left
the house, now in truth the White Huntress.

Camera and field glasses went with her; for lunch a bit of jerked beef
and a piece of hard chocolate. For to-day she began her winter work.
Again she was hunting. The forests as she slipped through them were
very still and seemed void of all the life that had swarmed here until
the snows came. But she would see snow birds, she might find a coyote
or a big snow-shoe rabbit. She would take pictures, too, such wintry
pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of
winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into
strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the
sweep of a stream seeming ink black against