WINTER PICTURES 



head of the valley, three quarters of a mile away ? 

 It is like a fly moving across an illuminated surface. 

 A distant mellow bay floats to us, and we know it 

 is the hound. He picked up the trail of the fox 

 half an hour since, where he had crossed the ridge 

 early in the morning, and now he has routed him 

 and Reynard is steering for the Big Mountain. 

 We press on and attain the shoulder of the range, 

 where we strike a trail two or three days old of 

 some former hunters, which leads us into the woods 

 along the side of the mountain. We are on the 

 first plateau before the summit; the snow partly 

 supports us, but when it gives way and we sound 

 it with our legs, we find it up to our hips. Here 

 we enter a white world indeed. It is like some 

 conjurer's trick. The very trees have turned to 

 snow. The smallest branch is like a cluster of great 

 white antlers. The eye is bewildered by the soft 

 fleecy labyrinth before it. On the lower ranges the 

 forests were entirely bare, but now we perceive the 

 summit of every mountain about us runs up into 

 a kind of arctic region where the trees are loaded 

 with snow. The beginning of this colder zone is 

 sharply marked all around the horizon ; the line 

 runs as level as the shore line of a lake or sea; in- 

 deed, a warmer aerial sea fills all the valleys, sub- 

 merging the lower peaks, and making white islands 

 of all the higher ones. The branches bend with 

 the rime. The winds have not shaken it down. 

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