One moonlit night as Midnight lay on his dry bed of needles he heard a strange sound and felt the earth tremble under him. The sound came from the rim above. He peered upward but could see nothing except the protruding snowbanks and the gleaming whiteness of the world outside his shelter. The sound was a deep, grating rumble that reminded him of distant thunder. One of the overhanging lips of snow had broken under the great weight of tons of snow and had settled down. For a few minutes it moved slowly, grinding rocks off the wall, settling, sliding, packing the snow into ice. Then its speed increased and the dull rumble broke into a terrible roar as thousands of tons of snow shot downward. Midnight leaped to his feet and trembled as he watched. The mass of snow plunged and boiled as it shot downward. It seethed around a stand of spruce. The big trees, many of them several feet through at the butt, jerked and swayed like saplings, then went down to be swallowed up by the maelstrom of ice and snow. Boulders were torn from their beds and from the face of the cliff. They were ground to sand in the maw of the slide. The whole cataract became dirty gray in color. Its roar shook the mesa as it poured into Shadow Canyon. A startled snowshoe rabbit, routed from his bed under a fallen log, leaped into the air, plunged forward, then bounced high as the dirty mass caught him. For a moment he hung above the seething mass, then dropped into it and vanished, ground to nothingness. The slide struck the lower end of the little mesa. It shot into the deep crevice, filling it full, then boiling over to roll on down into the main canyon. It cut a swath through the spruces and aspens growing on the steep slope of the big gulch. The timber went down like grass before the bar of a mowing machine. The white death was only a few seconds in passing but it struck fear into the heart of the black stallion. He snorted and pawed excitedly. And he was not alone in his fear. Up on the high mesa the old timber-line buck, who had returned to his feed grounds, leaped from his bed under a spruce. He stood staring out into the white world, rigid, shaking his heavy antlers and grunting. Every wild creature within hearing stopped and listened, tense, ready to break and run. They all knew the terror of the white death and each knew that to try to dash away would be useless because of the terrible speed and the uncertainty of the course it would take. They would try to run if it came hurtling upon them, but until they saw it they did not move. It was an hour before Midnight bedded down again.