may not be going right--if
the wind _has_ changed; or if you have not turned to the left when you
should have gone to the right.

Loneliness, anxiety, weariness, uncertainty. An awful sense of
helplessness takes possession of you. If it were daylight, you could
pass around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks
the same as the prairie grass swept bare. You plunge headlong into it,
flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face
sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, and struggle on.

You know that the snow, finer than flour, is beating through your
clothing. You are chilled, and shiver. Sometimes-you stop for a while
and with your hands over your eyes stand stooped with your back to the
wind. You try to stamp your feet to warm them, but the snow, soft and
yielding, forbids this. You are so tired that you stop to rest in the
midst of a great drift--you turn your face from the driving storm and
wait. It seems so much easier than stumbling wearily on. Then comes the
in-rushing consciousness that to rest thus is to die. You rush on in a
frenzy. You have long since ceased to think of what is your proper
course,--you only know that you must struggle on. You attempt a
shout;--ah, it seems so faint and distant even to yourself! No one else
could hear it a rod in this raging, howling, shrieking storm, in which
awful sounds come out of the air itself, and not alone from the things
against which it beats. And there is no one else to hear.

You gaze about with snow-smitten eyeballs for some possible light from
a friendly window. Why, the sun itself could not pierce this moving
earth-cloud of snow! Your feet are not so cold as they were. You can not
feel them as you walk. You come to a hollow filled with soft snow.
Perhaps there is the bed of a stream deep down below. You plunge into
this hollow, and as you fall, turn your face from the storm. A strange
and delicious sense of warmth and drowsiness steals over you; you sink
lower, and feel the cold soft whiteness sifting over neck and cheek and
forehead: but you do not care. The struggle is over; and--in the morning
the sun glints coldly over a new landscape of gently undulating
alabaster. Yonder is a little hillock which marks the place where the
blizzard overtook its prey. Sometime, when the warm March winds have
thawed the snow, some gaunt wolf will snuff about this spot, and send up
the long howl that calls the pack to the ba