Part 10

Weariness overcame me. In the open the howling and whistling of the wind always acts on me like a soporific. Inside of a house it is just the reverse; I know nothing that will keep my nerves as much on edge and prevent me as certainly from sleeping as the voices at night of a gale around the buildings. I needed something more definite to look at than that prospect ahead. The snow was by this time piling in on the seat at my right and in the box, so as to exclude all drafts except from below I felt that as a distinct advantage.

Without any conscious intention I began to peer out below the slanting edge of the left side-curtain and to watch the sharp crest-wave of snow-spray thrown by the curve of the runner where it cut into the freshly accumulating mass. It looked like the wing-wave thrown to either side by the bow of a power boat that cuts swiftly through quiet water. From it my eye began to slip over to the snow expanse. The road was wide, lined with brush along the fence to the left. The fields beyond had no very large open areas--windbreaks had everywhere been spared out when the primeval forest had first been broken into by the early settlers. So whatever the force of the wind might be, no high drift layer could form. But still the snow drifted. There was enough coming down from above to supply material even on such a narrow strip as a road allowance. It was the manner of this drifting that held my eye and my attention at last.

All this is, of course, utterly trivial. I had observed it myself a hundred times before. I observe it again to-day at this very writing, in the first blizzard of the season. It always has a strange fascination for me; but maybe I need to apologize for setting it down in writing.

The wind would send the snowflakes at a sharp angle downward to the older surface. There was no impact, as there is with rain. The flakes, of course, did not rebound. But they did not come to rest either, not for the most imperceptible fraction of time. As soon as they touched the white, underlying surface, they would start to scud along horizontally at a most amazing speed, forming with their previous path an obtuse angle. So long as I watched the single flake--which is quite a task, especially while driving--it seemed to be in a tremendous hurry. It rushed along very nearly at the speed of the wind, and that was considerable, say between thirty-five and forty miles an hour or even more. But then, when it hit the trail, the crack made by horses and runners, strange to say, it did not fall down perpendicularly, as it would have done had it acted there under the influence of gravity alone; but it started on a curved path towards the lower edge of the opposite wall of the crack and there, without touching the wall, it started back, first downward, thus making the turn, and then upward again, towards the upper edge of the east wall, and not in a straight line either, but in a wavy curve, rising very nearly but not quite to the edge; and only then would it settle down against the eastern wall of the track, helping to fill it in. I watched this with all the utmost effort of attention of which I was capable. I became intensely interested in my observations. I even made sure--as sure as anybody can be of anything--that the whole of this curious path lay in the same perpendicular plane which ran from the southeast to the northwest, that is to say in the direction of the main current of the wind. I have since confirmed these observations many times.

I am aware of the fact that nobody--nobody whom I know, at least--takes the slightest interest in such things. People watch birds because some “Nature-Study-cranks” (I am one of them) urge it in the schools. Others will make desultory observations on “Weeds” or “Native Trees.” Our school work in this respect seems to me to be most ridiculously and palpably superficial. Worst of all, most of it is dry as dust, and it leads nowhere. I sometimes fear there is something wrong with my own mentality. But to me it seems that the Kingdom of Heaven lies all around us, and that most of us simply prefer the moving-picture-show. I have kept weather records for whole seasons--brief notes on the everyday observations of mere nothings. You, for whom above all I am setting these things down, will find them among my papers one day. They would seem meaningless to most of my fellow men, I believe; to me they are absorbingly interesting reading when once in a great while I pick an older record up and glance it over. But this is digressing.

Now slowly, slowly another fact came home to me. This unanimous, synchronous march of all the flakes coming down over hundreds of square miles--and I was watching it myself over miles upon miles of road--in spite of the fact that every single flake seemed to be in the greatest possible hurry--was, judged as a whole, nevertheless an exceedingly leisurely process. In one respect it reminded me of bees swarming; watch the single bee, and it seems to fly at its utmost speed; watch the swarm, and it seems to be merely floating along. The reason, of course, is entirely different. The bees wheel and circle around individually, the whole swarm revolves--if I remember right, Burroughs has well described it (as what has he not?). [Footnote: Yes; I looked it up. See the “Pastoral Bees” in “Locusts and Wild Honey.”] But the snow will not change its direction while drifting in a wind that blows straight ahead. Its direction is from first to last the resultant of the direction of the wind and that of the pull of gravity, into which there enters besides only the ratio of the strengths of these two forces. The single snowflake is to the indifferent eye something infinitesimal, too small to take individual notice of, once it reaches the ground. For most of us it hardly has any separate existence, however it may be to more astute observers. We see the flakes in the mass, and we judge by results. Now firstly, to talk of results, the filling up of a hollow, unless the drifting snow is simply picked up from the ground where it lay ready from previous falls, proceeds itself rather slowly and in quite a leisurely way. But secondly, and this is the more important reason, the wind blows in waves of greater and lesser density; these waves--and I do not know whether this observation has ever been recorded though doubtless it has been made by better observers than I am--these waves, I say, are propagated in a direction opposite to that of the wind. They are like sound-waves sent into the teeth of the wind, only they travel more slowly. Anybody who has observed a really splashing rain on smooth ground--on a cement sidewalk, for instance--must have observed that the rebounding drops, like those that are falling, form streaks, because they, too, are arranged in vertical layers--or sheets--of greater and lesser density--or maybe the term “frequency” would be more appropriate; and these streaks travel as compared with the wind, and, as compared with its direction, they travel against it. It is this that causes the curious criss-cross pattern of falling and rebounding rain-streaks in heavy showers. Quite likely there are more competent observers who might analyze these phenomena better than I can do it; but if nobody else does, maybe I shall one day make public a little volume containing observations on our summer rains. But again I am digressing.

The snow, then, hits the surface of the older layers in waves, no matter whether the snow is freshly falling or merely drifting; and it is these waves that you notice most distinctly. Although they travel with the wind when you compare their position with points on the ground--yet, when compared with the rushing air above, it becomes clear that they travel against it. The waves, I say, not the flakes. The single flake never stops in its career, except as it may be retarded by friction and other resistances. But the aggregation of the multitudes of flakes, which varies constantly in its substance, creates the impression as if the snow travelled very much more slowly than in reality it does. In other words, every single flake, carried on by inertia, constantly passes from one air wave to the next one, but the waves themselves remain relatively stationary. They swing along in undulating, comparatively slow-moving sheets which may simply be retarded behind the speed of the wind, but more probably form an actual reaction, set up by a positive force counteracting the wind, whatever its origin may be.

When at last I had fully satisfied my mind as to the somewhat complicated mechanics of this thing, I settled back in my seat--against a cushion of snow that had meanwhile piled in behind my spine. If I remember right, I had by this time well passed the church. But for a while longer I looked out through the triangular opening between the door of the cutter and the curtain. I did not watch snowflakes or waves any longer, but I matured an impression. At last it ripened into words.

Yes, the snow, as figured in the waves, CRAWLED over the ground. There was in the image that engraved itself on my memory something cruel--I could not help thinking of the “cruel, crawling foam” and the ruminating pedant Ruskin, and I laughed. “The cruel, crawling snow!” Yes, and in spite of Ruskin and his “Pathetic Fallacy,” there it was! Of course, the snow is not cruel. Of course, it merely is propelled by something which, according to Karl Pearson, I do not even with a good scientific conscience dare to call a “force” any longer. But nevertheless, it made the impression of cruelty, and in that lay its fascination and beauty. It even reminded me of a cat slowly reaching out with armed claw for the “innocent” bird. But the cat is not cruel either--we merely call it so! Oh, for the juggling of words!...

Suddenly my horses brought up on a farmyard. They had followed the last of the church-goers’ trails, had not seen any other trail ahead and faithfully done their horse-duty by staying on what they considered to be the road.

I had reached the northern limit of that two-mile stretch of wild land. In summer there is a distinct and good road here, but for the present the snow had engulfed it. When I had turned back to the bend of the trail, I was for the first time up against a small fraction of what was to come. No trail, and no possibility of telling the direction in which I was going! Fortunately I realized the difficulty right from the start. Before setting out, I looked back to the farm and took my bearings from the fence of the front yard which ran north-south. Then I tried to hold to the line thus gained as best I could. It was by no means an easy matter, for I had to wind my weary way around old and new drifts, brush and trees. The horses were mostly up to their knees in snow, carefully lifting their hindlegs to place them in the cavities which their forelegs made. Occasionally, much as I tried to avoid it, I had to make a short dash through a snow dam thrown up over brush that seemed to encircle me completely. The going, to be sure, was not so heavy as it had been the day before on the corner of the marsh, but on the other hand I could not see as far beyond the horses’ heads. And had I been able to see, the less conspicuous landmarks would not have helped me since I did not know them. It took us about an hour to cross this untilled and unfenced strip. I came out on the next crossroad, not more than two hundred yards east of where I should have come out. I considered that excellent; but I soon was to understand that it was owing only to the fact that so far I had had no flying drifts to go through. Up to this point the snow was “crawling” only wherever the thicket opened up a little. What blinded my vision had so far been only the new, falling snow.

I am sure I looked like a snowman. Whenever I shook my big gauntlets bare, a cloud of exceedingly fine and hard snow crystals would hit my face; and seeing how much I still had ahead, I cannot say that I liked the sensation. I was getting thoroughly chilled by this time. The mercury probably stood at somewhere between minus ten and twenty. The very next week I made one trip at forty below--a thermometer which I saw and the accuracy of which I have reason to doubt showed minus forty-eight degrees. Anyway, it was the coldest night of the winter, but I was not to suffer then. I remember how about five in the morning, when I neared the northern correction line, my lips began to stiffen; hard, frozen patches formed on my cheeks, and I had to allow the horses to rub their noses on fence posts or trees every now and then, to knock the big icicles off and to prevent them from freezing up altogether--but. my feet and my hands and my body kept warm, for there was no wind. On drives like these your well-being depends largely on the state of your feet and hands. But on this return trip I surely did suffer. Every now and then my fingers would turn curd-white, and I had to remove my gauntlets and gloves, and to thrust my hands under my wraps, next to my body. I also froze two toes rather badly. And what I remember as particularly disagreeable, was that somehow my scalp got chilled. Slowly, slowly the wind seemed to burrow its way under my fur-cap and into my hair. After a while it became impossible for me to move scalp or brows. One side of my face was now thickly caked over with ice--which protected, but also on account of its stiffness caused a minor discomfort. So far, however, I had managed to keep both my eyes at work. And for a short while I needed them just now.

We were crossing a drift which had apparently not been broken into since it had first been piled up the previous week. Such drifts are dangerous because they will bear up for a while under the horses’ weight, and then the hard pressed crust will break and reveal a softer core inside. Just that happened here, and exactly at a moment, too, when the drifting snow caught me with its full force and at its full height. It was a quarter-minute of stumbling, jumping, pulling one against the other--and then a rally, and we emerged in front of a farmyard from which a fairly fresh trail led south. This trail was filled in, it is true, for the wind here pitched the snow by the shovelful, but the difference in colour between the pure white, new snow that filled it and the older surface to both sides made it sufficiently distinct for the horses to guide them. They plodded along.

Here miles upon miles of open fields lay to the southeast, and the snow that fell over all these fields was at once picked up by the wind and started its irresistible march to the northwest. And no longer did it crawl. Since it was bound upon a long-distance trip, somewhere in its career it would be caught in an upward sweep of the wind and thrown aloft, and then it would hurtle along at the speed of the wind, blotting everything from sight, hitting hard whatever it encountered, and piling in wherever it found a sheltered space. The height of this drifting snow layer varies, of course, directly and jointly (here the teacher makes fun of his mathematics) as the amount of loose snow available and as the carrying force of the wind. Many, many years ago I once saved the day by climbing on to the seat of my cutter and looking around from this vantage-point. I was lost and had no idea of where I was. There was no snowstorm going on at the time, but a recent snowfall was being driven along by a merciless northern gale. As soon as I stood erect on my seat, my head reached into a less dense drift layer, and I could clearly discern a farmhouse not more than a few hundred yards away. I had been on the point of accepting it as a fact that I was lost. Those tactics would not have done on this particular day, there being the snowstorm to reckon with. For the moment, not being lost, I was in no need of them, anyway. But even later the possible but doubtful advantage to be gained by them seemed more than offset by the great and certain disadvantage of having to get out of my robes and to expose myself to the chilling wind.

This north-south road was in the future invariably to seem endlessly long to me. There were no very prominent landmarks--a school somewhere--and there was hardly any change in the monotony of driving. As for landmarks, I should mention that there was one more at least. About two miles from the turn into that town which I have mentioned I crossed a bridge, and beyond this bridge the trail sloped sharply up in an s-shaped curve to a level about twenty or twenty-five feet higher than that of the road along which I had been driving. The bridge had a rail on its west side; but the other rail had been broken down in some accident and had never been replaced. I mention this trifle because it became important in an incident during the last drive which I am going to describe.

On we went. We passed the school of which I did not see much except the flagpole. And then we came to the crossroads where the trail bent west into the town. If I had known the road more thoroughly, I should have turned there, too. It would have added another two miles to my already overlong trip, but I invariably did it later on. Firstly, the horses will rest up much more completely when put into a stable for feeding. And secondly, there always radiate from a town fairly well beaten trails. It is a mistake to cut across from one such trail to another. The straight road, though much shorter, is apt to be entirely untravelled, and to break trail after a heavy snowstorm is about as hard a task as any that you can put your team up against. I had the road; there was no mistaking it; it ran along between trees and fences which were plainly visible; but there were ditches and brush buried under the snow which covered the grade to a depth of maybe three feet, and every bit of these drifts was of that treacherous character that I have described.

If you look at some small drift piled up, maybe, against the glass pane of a storm window, you can plainly see how the snow, even in such a miniature pile, preserves the stratified appearance which is the consequence of its being laid down in layers of varying density. Now after it has been lying for some time, it will form a crust on top which is sometimes the effect of wind pressure and sometimes--under favourable conditions--of superficial glaciation. A similar condensation takes place at the bottom as the result of the work of gravity: a harder core will form. Between the two there is layer upon layer of comparatively softer snow. In these softer layers the differences which are due to the stratified precipitation still remain. And frequently they will make the going particularly uncertain; for a horse will break through in stages only. He thinks that he has reached the carrying stratum, gets ready to take his next step--thereby throwing his whole weight on two or at best three feet--and just when he is off his balance, there is another caving in. I believe it is this what makes horses so nervous when crossing drifts. Later on in the winter there is, of course, the additional complication of successive snowfalls. The layers from this cause are usually clearly discernible by differences in colour.

I have never figured out just how far I went along this entirely unbroken road, but I believe it must have been for two miles. I know that my horses were pretty well spent by the time we hit upon another trail. It goes without saying that this trail, too, though it came from town, had not been gone over during the day and therefore consisted of nothing but a pair of whiter ribbons on the drifts; but underneath these ribbons the snow was packed. Hardly anybody cares to be out on a day like that, not even for a short drive. And though in this respect I differ in my tastes from other people, provided I can keep myself from actually getting chilled, even I began to feel rather forlorn, and that is saying a good deal.

A few hundred yards beyond the point where we had hit upon this new trail which was only faintly visible, the horses turned eastward, on to a field. Between two posts the wire of the fence had been taken down, and since I could not see any trail leading along the road further south, I let my horses have their will. I knew the farm on which we were. It was famous all around for its splendid, pure-bred beef cattle herd. I had not counted on crossing it, but I knew that after a mile of this field trail I should emerge on the farmyard, and since I was particularly well acquainted with the trail from there across the wild land to Bell’s corner, it suited me to do as my horses suggested. As a matter of fact this trail became--with the exception of one drive--my regular route for the rest of the winter. Never again was I to meet with the slightest mishap on this particular run. But to-day I was to come as near getting lost as I ever came during the winter, on those drives to and from the north.

For the next ten minutes I watched the work of the wind on the open field. As is always the case with me, I was not content with recording a mere observation. I had watched the thing a hundred times before. “Observing” means to me as much finding words to express what I see as it means the seeing itself. Now, when a housewife takes a thin sheet that is lying on the bed and shakes it up without changing its horizontal position, the running waves of air caught under the cloth will throw it into a motion very similar to that which the wind imparts to the snow-sheets, only that the snow-sheets will run down instead of up. Under a good head of wind there is a vehemence in this motion that suggests anger and a violent disposition. The sheets of snow are “flapped” down. Then suddenly the direction of the wind changes slightly, and the sheet is no longer flapped down but blown up. At the line where the two motions join we have that edge the appearance of which suggested to me the comparison with “exfoliated” rock in a previous paper. It is for this particular stage in the process of bringing about that appearance that I tentatively proposed the term “adfoliation.” “Adfoliated” edges are always to be found on the lee side of the sheet.

Sometimes, however, the opposite process will bring about nearly the same result. The snow-sheet has been spread, and a downward sweep of violent wind will hit the surface, denting it, scraping away an edge of the top layer, and usually gripping through into lower layers; then, rebounding, it will lift the whole sheet up again, or any part of it; and, shattering it into its component crystals, will throw these aloft and afar to be laid down again further on. This is true “exfoliation.” Since it takes a more violent burst of wind to effect this true exfoliation than it does to bring about the adfoliation, and since, further, the snow once indented, will yield to the depth of several layers, the true exfoliation edges are usually thicker than the others: and, of course, they are always to be found on the wind side.

Both kinds of lines are wavy lines because the sheets of wind are undulating. In this connection I might repeat once more that the straight line seems to be quite unknown in Nature, as also is uniformity of motion. I once watched very carefully a ferry cable strung across the bottom of a mighty river, and, failing to discover any theoretical reason for its vibratory motion, I was thrown back upon proving to my own satisfaction that the motion even of that flowing water in the river was the motion of a pulse; and I still believe that my experiments were conclusive. Everybody, of course, is familiar with the vibrations of telephone wires in a breeze. That humming sound which they emit would indeed be hard to explain without the assumption of a pulsating blow. Of course, it is easy to prove this pulsation in air. From certain further observations, which I do not care to speak about at present, I am inclined to assume a pulsating arrangement, or an alternation of layers of greater and lesser density in all organised--that is, crystalline--matter; for instance, in even such an apparently uniform block as a lump of metallic gold or copper or iron. This arrangement, of course, may be disturbed by artificial means; but if it is, the matter seems to be in an unstable condition, as is proved, for instance, by the sudden, unexpected breaking of apparently perfectly sound steel rails. There seems to be a condition of matter which so far we have largely failed to take into account or to utilise in human affairs...

I reached the yard, crossed it, and swung out through the front gate. Nowhere was anybody to be seen. The yard itself is sheltered by a curtain of splendid wild trees to the north, the east, and the south. So I had a breathing spell for a few minutes. I could also clearly see the gap in this windbreak through which I must reach the open. I think I mentioned that on the previous drive, going north, I had found the road four or five miles east of here very good indeed. But the reason had been that just this windbreak, which angles over to what I have been calling the twelve-mile bridge, prevented all serious drifting while the wind came from the north. To-day I was to find things different, for to the south the land was altogether open. The force of the wind alone was sufficient to pull the horses back to a walk, before we even had quite reached the open plain. It was a little after four when I crossed the gap, and I knew that I should have to make the greater part of what remained in darkness. I was about twelve miles from town, I should judge. The horses had not been fed. So, as soon as I saw how things were, I turned back into the shelter of the bluff to feed. I might have gone to the farm, but I was afraid it would cost too much time. After this I always went into town and fed in the stable. While the horses were eating and resting, I cleaned the cutter of snow looked after my footwarmer, and, by tramping about and kicking against the tree trunks, tried to get my benumbed circulation started again. My own lunch on examination proved to be frozen into one hard, solid lump. So I decided to go without it and to save it for my supper.

At half past four we crossed the gap in the bluffs for the second time.

Words fail me to describe or even to suggest the fury of the blast and of the drift into which we emerged. For a moment I thought the top of the cutter would be blown off. With the twilight that had set in the wind had increased to a baffling degree. The horses came as near as they ever came, in any weather, to turning on me and refusing to face the gale. And what with my blurred vision, the twisting and dodging about of the horses, and the gathering dusk, I soon did not know any longer where I was. There was ample opportunity to go wrong. Copses, single trees, and burnt stumps which dotted the wilderness had a knack of looming up with startling suddenness in front or on the side, sometimes dangerously close to the cutter. It was impossible to look straight ahead, because the ice crystals which mimicked snow cut right into my eyes and made my lids smart with soreness. Underfoot the rough ground seemed like a heaving sea. The horses would stumble, and the cutter would pitch over from one side to the other in the most alarming way. I saw no remedy. It was useless to try to avoid the obstacles--only once did I do so, and that time I had to back away from a high stump against which my drawbar had brought up. The pitching and rolling of the cutter repeatedly shook me out of my robes, and if, when starting up again from the bluff, I had felt a trifle more comfortable, that increment of consolation was soon lost.

We wallowed about--there is only this word to suggest the motion. To all intents and purposes I was lost. But still there was one thing, provided it had not changed, to tell me the approximate direction--the wind. It had been coming from the south-southeast. So, by driving along very nearly into its teeth, I could, so I thought, not help emerging on the road to town.

Repeatedly I wished I had taken the old trail. That fearful drift in the bush beyond the creek, I thought, surely had settled down somewhat in twenty-four hours. [Footnote: As a matter of fact I was to see it once more before the winter was over, and I found it settled down to about one third its original height. This was partly the result of superficial thawing. But still even then, shortly before the final thaw-up, it looked formidable enough.] I had had as much or more of unbroken trail to-day as on the day before. On the whole, though, I still believed that the four miles across the corner of the marsh south of the creek had been without a parallel in their demands on the horses’ endurance. And gradually I came to see that after all the horses probably would have given out before this, under the cumulative effect of two days of it, had they not found things somewhat more endurable to-day.

We wallowed along... And then we stopped. I shouted to the horses--nothing but a shout could have the slightest effect against the wind. They started to fidget and to dance and to turn this way and that, but they would not go. I wasted three or four minutes before I shook free of my robes and jumped out to investigate. Well, we were in the corner formed by two fences--caught as in a trap. I was dumbfounded. I did not know of any fence in these parts, of none where I thought I should be. And how had we got into it? I had not passed through any gate. There was, of course, no use in conjecturing. If the wind had not veered around completely, one of the fences must run north-south, the other one east-west, and we were in the southeast corner of some farm. Where there was a fence, I was likely to find a farmyard. It could not be to the east, so there remained three guesses. I turned back to the west. I skirted the fence closely, so closely that even in the failing light and in spite of the drifting snow I did not lose sight of it. Soon the going began to be less rough; the choppy motion of the cutter seemed to indicate that we were on fall-ploughed land; and not much later Peter gave a snort. We were apparently nearing a group of buildings. I heard the heavy thump of galloping horses, and a second later I saw a light which moved.