ond picture which is etched clearly on the
plate of my memory--stood on its pole, leaning at an angle of forty-five
degrees against the drift. The horses were as if stunned. "Dan, Peter!"
I shouted, and they struggled to their feet. They were badly winded, but
otherwise everything seemed all right. I looked wistfully back and up at
the gully which we had torn into the flank of the drift.

I should gladly have breathed the horses again, but they were hot, the
air was at zero or colder, the rays of the sun had begun to slant. I
walked for a while alongside the team. They were drooping sadly. Then
I got in again, driving them slowly till we came to the crossing of the
ditch. I had no eye for the grade ahead. On the bush road the going was
good--now and then a small drift, but nothing alarming anywhere. The
anti-climax had set in. Again the speckled trunks of the balm poplars
struck my eye, now interspersed with the scarlet stems of the red osier
dogwood. But they failed to cheer me--they were mere facts, unable to
stir moods...

I began to think. A few weeks ago I had met that American settler with
the French sounding name who lived alongside the angling dam further
north. We had talked snow, and he had said, "Oh, up here it never is bad
except along this grade,"--we were stopping on the last east-west grade,
the one I was coming to--"there you cannot get through. You'd kill your
horses. Level with the tree-tops." Well, I had had just that a little
while ago--I could not afford any more of it. So I made up my mind to
try a new trail, across a section which was fenced. It meant getting
out of my robes twice more, to open the gates, but I preferred that
to another tree-high drift. To spare my horses was now my only
consideration. I should not have liked to take the new trail by night,
for fear of missing the gates; but that objection did not hold just now.
Horses and I were pretty well spent. So, instead of forking off the main
trail to the north we went straight ahead.

In due time I came to the bridge which I had to cross in order to get
up on the dam. Here I saw--in an absent-minded, half unconscious, and
uninterested way--one more structure built by architect wind. The deep
master ditch from the north emptied here, to the left of the bridge,
into the grade ditch which ran east and west. And at the corner the snow
had very nearly bridged it--so nearly that you could easily have stepped
across the remaining gap. But belo