spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow.
Blanketed in white, the upland mesas lay like great, tideless lakes,
silent and desolate from green-edged shore to shore. The shadowy caverns
of the timberlands, touched here and there with a ray of sunlight,
thrilled to the creeping fingers of the cold. Tough fibers of the
stiff-ranked pines parted with a crackling groan, as though unable to
bear silently the reiterant stabbing of the frost needles. The frozen
gum of the black spruce glowed like frosted topaz. The naked whips of
the quaking asp were brittle traceries against the hard blue of the sky.

Below the rounded shoulders of the peaks ran an incessant whispering as
thin swirls of powdered snow spun down the wind and sifted through the
moving branches below.

The tawny lynx and the mist-gray mountain lion hunted along snow-banked
ranger trails. The blue grouse sat stiff and close to the tree-trunk,
while gray squirrels with quaintly tufted ears peered curiously at
sinuous forms that nosed from side to side of the hidden trail below.

The two cabins of the Blue Mesa, hooded in white, thrust their lean
stovepipes skyward through two feet of snow. The corrals were shallow
fortifications, banked breast-high. The silence seemed not the silence
of slumber, but that of a tense waiting, as though the whole winter
world yearned for the warmth of spring.

No creak of saddle or plod of hoof broke the bleak stillness, save when
some wandering Apache hunted the wild turkey or the deer, knowing that
winter had locked the trails to his ancient heritage; that the white
man's law of boundaries was void until the snows were thin upon the
highest peaks.

Thirty miles north of this white isolation the low country glowed in a
sun that made golden the far buttes and sparkled on the clay-red waters
of the Little Colorado. Four thousand feet below the hills cattle
drifted across the open lands.

Across the ranges, to the south, the barren sands lay shimmering in a
blur of summer heat waves; the winter desert, beautiful in its golden
lights and purple, changing shadows. And in that Southern desert, where
the old Apache Trail melts into the made roads of ranchland and town,
Bronson toiled at his writing. And Dorothy, less slender, more
sprightly, growing stronger in the clean, clear air and the sun,
dreamed of her "ranger man" and the blue hills of her autumn wonderland.
With the warmth of summer around her, the lizards on the r