For many days the blizzard raged and roared and the snow fell. When the storm cleared, the snow was deeper than it had been in many winters. It piled in great, hundred-foot drifts along the comb ridges, in lips which thrust themselves out over the spruce below. Slides roared into the canyons as those lips broke and shot down the steep slopes. The white terrors mowed swaths through the spruce and tore great boulders from their beds, grinding them to dingy gray rivers of twisting, roaring debris which cascaded into the creek bottoms and slid up the far slopes. The thunder of the slides shook the mesa and the ridges, starting new rivers of snow. When the white death roared, Midnight always crowded close to his mother’s side and stared up at the ridges trying to see the monster that could roar louder than any animal he had ever heard. Lady Ebony was disturbed but she nickered reassuringly to her son and did not lead a charge through the deep snow. Digging for food was a job which required all the short day. The upper end of the meadow still offered the best feed ground, though the snow lay three feet deep on that part of it. The timber-line buck came down from a bed in the rocks and fed close to the horses. He ate much grass now because he could not scoop the snow away so easily as the horses did. And he browsed on willow growing along the stream, but such feeding meant fighting snow six feet deep. Sometimes he followed the horses and ate the weeds they uncovered and left untouched. Lady Ebony and Midnight came to expect the timber-line buck to join them in their battle for food. The three fed close together in comradeship. Theirs was a common fight against a common enemy. The buck no longer charged at Midnight when the little horse walked up to him. And Lady Ebony no longer whinnied warningly when her son approached the antlered monarch. Life was hard for the three on the mesa, but not as hard as it was for the killers who roamed the silent forests. The gray wolves and the cougars hunted daily, their sides gaunt. The snowy owls beat along the edges of the timber, their glassy eyes staring down savagely. But there was little food. The snow had not crusted and the gray wolves and the cougars could not overtake the hardy mule deer remaining in the mountains. They wallowed and floundered while the deer and the elk bounded up and clear of the clinging drifts. Night and day the killers hunted with savage intensity, their yellow eyes flaming with savage hunger. When one of a wolf pack was wounded or crippled, the pack turned on him and devoured him as they would any lesser prey.