CHAPTER XX
BOREAS CHANTS HIS LAY
December winged by, the days succeeding each other like glittering
panels on a black ground of long, drear nights. Christmas came. They
mustered up something of the holiday spirit, dining gayly off a roast
of caribou. For the occasion Hazel had saved the last half dozen
potatoes. With the material at her command she evolved a Christmas
pudding, serving it with brandy sauce. And after satisfying appetites
bred of a morning tilt with Jack Frost along Bill's trap line, they
spent a pleasant hour picturing their next Christmas. There would be
holly and bright lights and music--the festival spirit freed of all
restraint.
The new year was born in a wild smother of flying snow, which died at
dawn to let a pale, heatless sun peer tentatively over the southern
mountains, his slanting beams setting everything aglitter. Frost
particles vibrated in the air, coruscating diamond dust. Underfoot, on
the path beaten betwixt house and stable, the snow crunched and
complained as they walked, and in the open where the mad winds had
piled it in hard, white windrows. But in the thick woods it lay as it
had fallen, full five foot deep, a downy wrapping for the slumbering
earth, over which Bill Wagstaff flitted on his snowshoes as silently as
a ghost--a fur-clad ghost, however, who bore a rifle on his shoulder,
and whose breath exhaled in white, steamy puffs.
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