om
three to four feet deep, and in many places it drifts to fifteen or
twenty feet deep. The ice on the lakes and rivers is sometimes above
six feet thick; and the salt sea itself, in Hudson's Bay, is frozen over
to a great extent. Nothing like a thaw takes place for many months at a
time, and the frost is so intense that it is a matter of difficulty to
prevent one's-self from being frost-bitten. The whole country, during
these long winter months, appears white, desolate, and silent.

Yet a good many of the birds and animals keep moving about, though most
of them do so at night, and do not often meet the eye of man. The bear
goes to sleep all winter in a hole, but the wolf and the fox prowl about
the woods at night. Ducks, geese, and plover no longer enliven the
marshes with their wild cries; but white grouse, or ptarmigan, fly about
in immense flocks, and arctic hares make many tracks in the deep snow.
Still, these are quiet creatures, and they scarcely break the deep dead
silence of the forests in winter.

At this period the Indian and the fur-trader wrap themselves in warm
dresses of deer-skin, lined with the thickest flannel, and spend their
short days in trapping and shooting. At night the Indian piles logs on
his fire to keep out the frost, and adds to the warmth of his skin-tent
by heaping snow up the outside of it all round. The fur-trader puts
double window-frames and double panes of glass in his windows, puts on
double doors, and heats his rooms with cast-iron stoves.

But do what he will, the fur-trader cannot keep out the cold altogether.
He may heat the stove red-hot if he will, yet the water in the basins
and jugs in the corner of his room will be frozen, and his breath
settles on the window-panes, and freezes there so thickly that it
actually dims the light of the sun. This crust on the windows _inside_
is sometimes an inch thick!

Thermometers in England are usually filled with quicksilver. In
Rupert's Land quicksilver would be frozen half the winter, so spirit of
wine is used instead, because that liquid will not freeze with any
ordinary degree of cold. Here, the thermometer sometimes falls as low
as zero. Out there it does not rise so high as zero during the greater
part of the winter, and it is often as low as twenty, thirty, and even
fifty degrees _below_ zero.

If the wind should blow when the cold is intense, no man dare face it--
he would be certain to be frost-bitten. The parts o