bed lay beyond the woods, a long tramp through 

 the snow. 



As the black creature grew small in the dis- 

 tance and vanished among the trees, I felt a 

 pang of pity for him. I knew by his flight that 

 he was hungry and weary and cold. Every 

 labored stroke of his unsteady wings told of a 

 long struggle with the winter death. He was 

 silent ; and his muteness spoke the foreboding 

 and dread with which he faced another bitter 

 night in the pines. 



The snow was half-way to my knees ; and still 

 another storm was brewing. All day the leaden 

 sky had been closing in, weighed down by the 

 snow-filled air. That hush which so often pre- 

 cedes the severest winter storms brooded every- 

 where. The winds were in leash no, not in 

 leash ; for had my ears been as keen as those of 

 the creatures about me, I might even now have 

 heard them baying far away to the north. It 

 was not the winds that were still ; it was the 

 fields and forests that quailed before the onset 

 of the storm. 



I skirted Lupton's Pond and saw the muskrat 

 village, a collection of white mounds out in the 



[20] 



