ls shone blue from the white frost. Why the frost did not kill
these beautiful flowers was a mystery to me. The horses could not step
without crushing them.

Before long, the ravines became so deep that we had to zigzag up and
down their sides, and to force our horses through the aspen thickets in
the hollows. Once from a ridge I saw a troop of deer, and stopped to
watch them. Twenty-seven I counted outright, but there must have been
three times that number. I saw the herd break across a glade, and
watched them until they were lost in the forest. My companions having
disappeared, I pushed on, and while working out of a wide, deep hollow,
I noticed the sunny patches fade from the bright slopes, and the golden
streaks vanish among the pines. The sky had become overcast, and the
forest was darkening. The "Waa-hoo," I cried out returned in echo only.
The wind blew hard in my face, and the pines began to bend and roar. An
immense black cloud enveloped Buckskin.

Satan had carried me no farther than the next ridge, when the forest
frowned dark as twilight, and on the wind whirled flakes of snow. Over
the next hollow, a white pall roared through the trees toward me.
Hardly had I time to get the direction of the trail, and its relation
to the trees nearby, when the storm enfolded me. Of his own accord
Satan stopped in the lee of a bushy spruce. The roar in the pines
equaled that of the cave under Niagara, and the bewildering, whirling
mass of snow was as difficult to see through as the tumbling, seething
waterfall.

I was confronted by the possibility of passing the night there, and
calming my fears as best I could, hastily felt for my matches and
knife. The prospect of being lost the next day in a white forest was
also appalling, but I soon reassured myself that the storm was only a
snow squall, and would not last long. Then I gave myself up to the
pleasure and beauty of it. I could only faintly discern the dim trees;
the limbs of the spruce, which partially protected me, sagged down to
my head with their burden; I had but to reach out my hand for a
snowball. Both the wind and snow seemed warm. The great flakes were
like swan feathers on a summer breeze. There was something joyous in
the whirl of snow and roar of wind. While I bent over to shake my
holster, the storm passed as suddenly as it had come. When I looked up,
there were the pines, like pillars of Parian marble, and a white
shadow, a vanishing cloud fled, with rece