l sheltered. Here I felt
for a moment as if all the snow of the universe had piled in. As I said,
I was so completely baffled that I could have turned the horses then and
there.

But after a minute or two my eyes began to cast about. I turned to the
south, right into the dense underbrush and towards the creek which
here swept south in a long, flat curve. Peter was always intolerant
of anything that moved underfoot. He started to bolt when the dry and
hard-frozen stems snapped and broke with reports resembling pistol
shots. But since Dan kept quiet, I held Peter well in hand. I went along
the drift for maybe three to four hundred yards, reconnoitring. Then the
trees began to stand too dense for me to proceed without endangering my
cutter. Just beyond I saw the big trough of the creek bed, and though
I could not make out how conditions were at its bottom, the drift
continued on its southern bank, and in any case it was impossible to
cross the hollow. So I turned; I had made up my mind to try the drift.

About a hundred and fifty yards from the point where I had turned off
the road there was something like a fold in the flank of the drift. At
its foot I stopped. For a moment I tried to explain that fold to myself.
This is what I arrived at. North of the drift, just about where the new
cut-out joined the east-west grade, there was a small clearing caused
by a bush fire which a few years ago had penetrated thus far into this
otherwise virgin corner of the forest. Unfortunately it stood so full of
charred stumps that it was impossible to get through there. But the main
currents of the wind would have free play in this opening, and I knew
that, when the blizzard began, it had been blowing from a more northerly
quarter than later on, when it veered to the northwest. And though the
snow came careering along the lane of the cut-out, that is, from due
north, its "throw" and therefore, the direction of the drift would be
determined by the direction of the wind that took charge of it on this
clearing. Probably, then, a first, provisional drift whose long axis lay
nearly in a north-south line, had been piled up by the first, northerly
gale. Later a second, larger drift had been superimposed upon it at an
angle, with its main axis running from the northwest to the southeast.
The fold marked the point where the first, smaller drift still emerged
from the second larger one. This reasoning was confirmed by a study of
the clearing itself