Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
This is no place to tell of the beauty and wonder of snow and ice, the
soft contours of gentle slopes, the rippling of fine snow under a steady
wind, the long shadow ridges of shining powder on the lee of trees and
stones and rocks, the delicate wind streaks over broad surfaces like the
marks of a chisel in marble, the crests and cornices, the vivid
brightness of edges in the sun, the glowing yellowish light on sunlit
surfaces, the long blue shadows, the flush of sunset and sunrise and the
pallid unearthly desolation of snow beneath the moon. Nor need the
broken snow in woods and amidst tumbled stony slopes be described, nor
the vast soft overhanging crests on every outstanding rock beside the
icebound river, nor the huge stalactites and stalagmites of green-blue
ice below the cliffs, nor trees burdened and broken by frost and snow,
nor snow upon ice, nor the blue pools at mid-day upon the surface of the
ice-stream. Across the smooth wind-swept ice of the open tarns they
would find a growth of ice flowers, six-rayed and complicated, more
abundant and more beautiful than the Alpine summer flowers.
But the wind was very bitter, and the sun had scarcely passed its zenith
before the thought of fuel and shelter came back into their minds.
As they approached Partington's tilt, at the point where his trapping
ground turned out of the Green River gorge, he became greatly obsessed
by the thought of his traps. He began to talk of all that he might find
in them, all he hoped to find, and the "dallars" that might ensue. They
slept the third night, Marjorie within and the two men under the lee of
the little cabin, and Partington was up and away before dawn to a trap
towards the ridge. He had infected Marjorie and Trafford with a
sympathetic keenness, but when they saw his killing of a marten that was
still alive in its trap, they suddenly conceived a distaste for
trapping.
They insisted they must witness no more. They would wait while he went
to a trap....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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