I had wished to see Kinnerly Peak again, rising from the western Kintla valley, and walk along black ledges of the lava that floors the pass. Beyond it grows a grove of subalpine larch, stately, seldom encountered, the least common tree species in Glacier. Confined to this narrow zone between forest and alpine, it reaches up tall and proud, impervious to the gruelling climate that makes cowering shrubs of other trees. But all must wait another year, for this season comes down hard. And the will of winter is to erase whatever summer had devised. Tundra Porcelain-cold, the November sun dawns in the southeast sky. The ledges, ice-encrusted, layered with sleet from a recent squall, whistle the cold morning wind aside. Rattling down, a slide of rock plunges off the final ledge, seconds passing before the hollow sounds of impact clatter back. Like an apparition of winter itself, white beard bent sideways by the wind, a mountain goat steps to the precipice edge. Looking out across the vast white void, its long belly hair and pantaloons streaming with the ceaseless wind, this strange animal, product of some unfathomable ingenuity, hesitates but a moment; dropping down from step to invisible step along the sheer rock face, fracturing the ice glaze as it goes, it turns a wall and disappears. A nimble, eight-months-old kid follows. Blinking and twisting in the dull light, the shower of shattered ice clinks softly downward against rock, fading away like the short summers of this place. But while the wind chants winter, life has made a passage here, and also waits, hidden in seed and root and den. ■ The nanny and her kid have bedded down now, looking across the deep, snowy basin below. Their ledge shines with the first spear of sunlight. Far below the pass that connects Mount Siyeh to the snow-giants Matahpi and Going-to-the-sun, three male white-tailed ptarmigan emerge from their night’s huddle within a snowbank and step out to peck at an exposed mat of willow. Ptarmigan, the only birds on the winter tundra, wear white plumage in this season, helping to camouflage them in the snow, just as their mottled brown summer plumage makes them difficult to detect among bare rocks. There are few predators here to hunt them now, but they move with habitual slowness; quick movement can be fatal when summer brings numerous eyes to scan the slopes. With legs and feet heavily feathered and sharp claws to scratch for food beneath the snow, the ptarmigan live at truce with winter. When blizzards rage between the peaks, they nestle together in snow dens, beyond the reach of the winds. Ptarmigan hens winter lower in taller willow thickets, but the males prefer to take their winter as high as possible. Now they crouch behind the wind-deflecting rocks, dozing in the meager warmth of the morning sun. Near the snowless summit crags, a flash of brown fur zigzags among the rocks. That would be a pika. Only for a moment does it show itself, so quickly does it move.