which I came to make two or three weeks after.

Before I called on the horses to give me their very last ounce of
strength, I got out of my cutter once more and made sure that my lines
were still sound. I trusted my ability to guide the horses even in this
crucial test, but I dreaded nothing so much as that the lines might
break; and I wanted to guard against any accident. I should mention
that, of course, the top of my cutter was down, that the traces of the
harness were new, and that the cutter itself during its previous trials
had shown an exceptional stability. Once more I thus rested my horses
for five minutes; and they seemed to realize what was coming. Their
heads were up, their ears were cocked. When I got back into my cutter,
I carefully brushed the snow from moccasins and trousers, laid the robe
around my feet, adjusted my knees against the dashboard, and tied two
big loops into the lines to hold them by.

Then I clicked my tongue. The horses bounded upward in unison. For a
moment it looked as if they intended to work through, instead of over,
the drift. A wild shower of angular snow-slabs swept in upon me.
The cutter reared up and plunged and reared again--and then the view
cleared. The snow proved harder than I had anticipated--which bespoke
the fury of the blow that had piled it. It did not carry the horses, but
neither--once we had reached a height of five or six feet--did they sink
beyond their bellies and out of sight. I had no eye for anything except
them. What lay to right or left, seemed not to concern me. I watched
them work. They went in bounds, working beautifully together.
Rhythmically they reared, and rhythmically they plunged. I had dropped
back to the seat, holding them with a firm hand, feet braced against the
dashboard; and whenever they got ready to rear, I called to them in a
low and quiet voice, "Peter--Dan--now!" And their muscles played with
the effort of desperation. It probably did not take more than five
minutes, maybe considerably less, before we had reached the top, but to
me it seemed like hours of nearly fruitless endeavour. I did not realize
at first that we were high. I shall never forget the weird kind of
astonishment when the fact came home to me that what snapped and
crackled in the snow under the horses' hoofs, were the tops of trees.
Nor shall the feeling of estrangement, as it were--as if I were not
myself, but looking on from the outside at the adventure of somebody
who