The snow was driving hard, and there was a sting in it. The thermometer was little above zero; but the snow had been a familiar bedfellow, for centuries, to Lad's Scottish forefathers; and the cold was harmless against the woven thickness of his tawny coat. Picking his way in stately fashion along the ill-broken track of the driveway, he strolled toward the woods. To humans there was nothing in the outdoor day but snow and chill and bluster and bitter loneliness. To the trained eye and the miraculous scent-power of a collie it contained a million things of dramatic interest. Here a rabbit had crossed the trail--not with leisurely bounds or mincing hops, but stomach to earth, in flight for very life. Here, close at the terrified bunny's heels, had darted a red fox. Yonder, where the piling snow covered a swirl of tracks, the chase had ended. The little ridge of snow-heaped furrow, to the right, held a basketful of cowering quail--who heard Lad's slow step and did not reckon on his flawless gift of smell. On the hemlock tree just ahead a hawk had lately torn a blue-jay asunder. A fluff of gray feathers still stuck to a bough, and the scent of blood had not been blown out of the air. Underneath, a field-mouse was plowing its way into the frozen earth, its tiny paw-scrapes wholly audible to the ears of the dog above it. Here, through the stark and drifted undergrowth, Rex and Wolf had recently swept along in pursuit of a half-grown rabbit. Even a human eye could not have missed their partly-covered tracks; but Lad knew whose track was whose and which dog had been in the lead. Yes, to humans, the forest would have seemed a deserted white waste. Lad knew it was thick-populated with the Little People of the woodland, and that all day and all night the seemingly empty and placid groves were a blend of battlefield, slaughterhouse and restaurant. Here, as much as in the cities or in the trenches, abode strenuous life, violent death, struggle, greed and terror. A partridge rocketed upward through a clump of evergreen, while a weasel, jaws a-quiver, glared after it, baffled. A shaggy owl crouched at a tree-limb hole and blinked sulkily about in search of prey and in hope of dusk. A crow, its black feet red with a slain snowbird's blood, flapped clumsily overhead. A poet would have vowed that the still and white-shrouded wilderness was a shrine sacred to solitude and severe peace. Lad could have told him better. Nature (beneath the surface) is never solitary and never at peace. When a dog is very old and very heavy and a little unwieldy, it is hard to walk through sixteen-inch snow, even if one moves slowly and sedately. Hence Lad was well pleased to come upon a narrow woodland track; made by a laborer who had passed and repassed through that same strip of forest during the last few hours. To follow in that trampled rut made walking much easier; it was a rut barely wide enough for one wayfarer.