anything of the horses except their heads. I inferred their motions
from the dusting snowcloud that rose above their bodies and settled
on myself. And then somehow we emerged. We reached a stretch of ground
where the snow was just high enough to cover the hocks of the horses. It
was a hollow scooped out by some freak of the wind. I pulled in, and the
horses stood panting. Peter no longer showed any desire to fret and to
jump. Both horses apparently felt the wisdom of sparing their strength.
They were all white with the frost of their sweat and the spray of the
snow...

While I gave them their time, I looked around, and here a lesson came
home to me. In the hollow where we stood, the snow did not lie smoothly.
A huge obstacle to the northwest, probably a buried clump of brush, had
made the wind turn back upon itself, first downward, then, at the bottom
of the pit, in a direction opposite to that of the main current above,
and finally slantways upward again to the summit of the obstacle, where
it rejoined the parent blow. The floor of the hollow was cleanly
scooped out and chiselled in low ridges; and these ridges came from the
southeast, running their points to the northwest. I learned to look out
for this sign, and I verily believe that, had I not learned that lesson
right now, I should never have reached the creek which was still four or
five miles distant.

The huge mound in the lee of which I was stopping was a matter of two
hundred yards away; nearer to it the snow was considerably deeper;
and since it presented an appearance very characteristic of Prairie
bush-drifts, I shall describe it in some detail. Apparently the winds
had first bent over all the stems of the clump; for whenever I saw one
of them from the north, it showed a smooth, clean upward sweep. On the
south side the snow first fell in a sheer cliff; then there was a hollow
which was partly filled by a talus-shaped drift thrown in by the counter
currents from the southern pit in which we were stopping; the sides of
this talus again showed the marks that reminded of those left by the
spoon when butter is roughly stroked into the shape of a pyramid. The
interesting parts of the structure consisted in the beetling brow of the
cliff and the roof of the cavity underneath. The brow had a honeycombed
appearance; the snow had been laid down in layers of varying density (I
shall discuss this more fully in the next chapter when we are going
to look in on the snow