194 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
and others were carried home and with diffi- 
culty preserved, only about sixty being lost in 
all. Marvellous to tell, the country people 
unanimously agreed afterwards to refer the 
whole terrific storm to some secret incantations 
of poor Hogg’s literary society ; it was gener- 
ally maintained that a club of young dare-devils 
had raised the Fiend himself among them in 
the likeness of a black dog, the night preceding 
the storm; and the young students actually did 
not dare to show themselves at fairs or at mar- 
kets for a year afterwards. 
Snow scenes less exciting, but more wild and 
dreary, may be found in Alexander Henry’s 
Travels with the Indians, more than a century 
ago. In the winter of 1776, for instance, they 
wandered for many hundred miles over the 
farthest northwestern prairies, where scarcely a 
white man had before trodden. The snow lay 
from four to six feet deep, and they went on 
snowshoes, drawing their stores on sleds. The 
mercury was sometimes —32°; no fire could keep 
them warm at night, and often they had no fire, 
being scarcely able to find wood enough to melt 
the snow for drink. They lay beneath buffalo- 
skins and the stripped bark of trees: a foot of 
snow sometimes fell on them before morning. 
The sun rose at half past nine and set at half 
past two. “The country was one uninterrupted 
