day might never come, to
bother about delivering myself of the many laboriously concocted
truths which I'd assembled for my bone-headed lord and master. I was
grateful enough for things as they were, and I could afford to be
generous.

_Sunday the Ninth_

For the first time since I came out on the prairie, I dread the thought
of winter. Yet it's really something more than the winter I dread,
since snow and cold have no terrors for me. I need only to look back
about ten short months and think of those crystal-clear winter days of
ours, with the sleigh piled up with its warm bear-robes, the low sun on
the endless sea of white, the air like champagne, the spanking team
frosted with their own breath, the caroling sleigh-bells, and the man
who still meant so much to me at my side. Then the homeward drive at
night, under violet clear skies, over drifts of diamond-dust, to the
warmth and peace and coziness of one's own hearth! It was often
razor-edge weather, away below zero, but we had furs enough to defy any
threat of frost-nip.

We still have the furs, it's true, but there's the promise of a
different kind of frost in the air now, a black frost that creeps into
the heart which no furs can keep warm....

We still have the furs, as I've already said, and I've been looking
them over. They're so plentiful in this country that I've rather lost
my respect for them. Back in the old days I used to invade those
mirrored and carpeted _salons_ where a trained and deferential
saleswoman would slip sleazy and satin-lined moleskin coats over my
arms and adjust baby-bear and otter and ermine and Hudson-seal next to
my skin. It always gave me a very luxurious and Empressy sort of
feeling to see myself arrayed, if only experimentally, in silver-fox
and plucked beaver and fisher, to feel the soft pelts and observe how
well one's skin looked above seal-brown or shaggy bear.

But I never knew what it cost. I never even considered where they came
from, or what they grew on, and it was to me merely a vague and
unconfirmed legend that they were all torn from the carcasses of
far-away animals. Prairie life has brought me a little closer to that
legend, and now that I know what I do, it makes a difference.

For with the coming of the cold weather, last winter, Francois and
Whinstane Sandy took to trapping, to fill in the farm-work hiatus.
They made it a campaign, and prepared for it carefully, concocting
st