V 



WINTER WEATHER 



r HEN the days have dwindled to their shortest, and 

 the nights seem never ending, then all the great 

 northern plains are changed into an abode of iron 

 desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the 

 north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow- 

 t, wrapping the mantle of death round every unshel- 

 being that faces their unshackled anger. They 

 roar in a thunderous bass as they sweep across the prairie 

 or whirl through the naked canons ; they shiver the great brittle cotton- 

 woods, and beneath their rough touch the icy limbs of the pines that 

 cluster in the gorges sing like the chords of an ^olian harp. Again, in 

 the coldest midwinter weather, not a breath of wind may stir ; and then 

 the still, merciless, terrible cold that broods over the earth like the shadow 

 of silent death seems even more dreadful in its gloomy rigor than is the 

 lawless madness of the storms. All the land is like granite; the great 

 rivers stand still in their beds, as if turned to frosted steel. In the long 

 nights there is no sound to break the lifeless silence. Under the ceaseless, 

 shifting play of the Northern Lights, or lighted only by the wintry brill- 

 iance of the stars, the snow-clad plains stretch out into dead and endless 

 wastes of glimmering white. 



Then the great fire-place of the ranch house is choked with blazing 

 logs, and at night we have to sleep under so many blankets that the 

 weight is fairly oppressive. Outside, the shaggy ponies huddle together 

 in the corral, while long icicles hang from their lips, and the hoar-frost 

 whitens the hollow backs of the cattle. For the ranchman the winter is 

 occasionally a pleasant holiday, but more often an irksome period of 

 enforced rest and gloomy foreboding. 



