When the clouds blew away, and the air grew clear, the temperature began to fall. Dan had no way of knowing how low it went. Thermometers were not considered essential at the Lennox home. But when his eyelids congealed with the frost, and his mittens froze to the logs of firewood that he carried through the door, and the pine trees exploded and cracked in the darkness, he was correct in his belief that it was very, very cold.
But he loved the cold, and the silence and austerity that went with it. The wilderness claimed him as never before. The rugged breed that were his ancestors had struggled through such seasons as this and passed a love of them down through the years to him.
When the ice made a crust over the snow, he learned to walk on snowshoes. At first there were pained ankles and endless floundering in the drifts. But between the fall of fresh snow and the thaws that softened the crust, he slowly mastered the art. Snowbird--and Dan never realized the full significance of her name until he saw her flying with incredible grace over the snow--laughed at him at first and ran him races that would usually end in his falling head-first into a ten-foot snowbank. She taught him how to ski and more than once she would stop in the middle of an earnest bit of pedagogy to find that he wasn't listening at all. He would seem to be fairly devouring her with his eyes, delighting in the play of soft pinks and reds in her cheeks, and drinking, as a man drinks wine, the amazing change of light and shadow in her eyes.
She seemed to blossom under his gaze. Not one of those short winter days went by without the discovery of some new trait or little vanity to astonish or delight him,--sometimes an unlooked-for tenderness toward the weak, often a sweet, untainted philosophy of life, or perhaps just a lowering of her eyelids in which her eyes would show lustrous through the lashes, or some sweeping, exuberant gesture startlingly graceful.
Lennox wakened one morning with the realization that this was one of the hardest winters of his experience. More snow had fallen in the night and had banked halfway up his windows. The last of the shrubbery--except for the ends of a few tall bushes that would not hold the snow--was covered, and the roofs of some of the lower outbuildings had somewhat the impression of drowning things, striving desperately to keep their heads above water. He began to be very glad of the abundant stores of provisions that overcrowded his pantry--savory hams and bacons, dried venison, sacks of potatoes and evaporated vegetables, and, of course, canned goods past counting. With the high fire roaring in the grate, the season held no ills for them. But sometimes, when the bitter cold came down at twilight, and the moon looked like a thing of ice itself over the snow, he began to wonder how the wild creatures who wintered on the Divide were faring. Of course most of them were gone. Woof, long since, had grunted and mumbled his way into a winter lair. But the wolves remained, strange gray shadows on the snow, and possibly a few of the hardier smaller creatures.