pine-trees creak although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs
rock by the water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently
and falls off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the
room.

This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of the
sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After it runs
a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their holes.
Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days with increasing
stillness. Only Clark's crow and the strident jays make light of it;
only they can afford to. The cattle get down to the foothills and
ground-inhabiting creatures make fast their doors. It grows chill, blind
clouds fumble in the canons; there will be a roll of thunder, perhaps,
or a flurry of rain, but mostly the snow is born in the air with
quietness and the sense of strong white pinions softly stirred. It
increases, is wet and clogging, and makes a white night of midday.

There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain, but later,
when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the slopes, the
drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules at the
wind's will. Keen mornings after a storm they are blown out in wreaths
and banners from the high ridges sifting into the canons.

Once in a year or so we have a "big snow." The cloud tents are widened
out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two and are drawn
tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white mist
that fills and fills between the ridges, and the air is thick with
formless groaning. Now for days you get no hint of the neighboring
ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak
lifts through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue,
two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times to go
up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the unstable
drifts "tainted wethers" of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger;
easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and
once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.

No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver fir. The
star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft wreaths--droop
and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point of overloading is
reached, there is a soft sough and muffled drooping, the boughs recover,
and the weighting goes on until the d