Early next morning the snow begins to fall, thin and glassy, bringing in a new kind of quiet, unpredictable intent, spotting the thawed surface of the earth. After a few hours the flakes are heavier, and their momentum increases. They run down dizzily, with a ticking sound, shrouding the distance, pelting dead leaves, collecting in clumps between the needles of the pitch pines, coming down steadily and fast. The temperature drops quite suddenly, and the snow flakes grow lighter again. The wind sharpens, sending them ahead of it, lancing toward the south. Hour after hour the snow collects with mesmerizing totality, and in the colder evening the wind drives in with great fury and drifts pile up. Dry snow whirls in and races around the windows, scouring them like a dust storm. The wind molds a long drift on the north side of the house, like flesh over bone, hip edge out and curving in, a woman’s shape, an inanimate body molded by violence into classic beauty, hollowed, not for love unless the wind is love, carved, marked down and conquered by everything that is latent and unconquered in the storm. For many days afterward the arctic air reigns over us, and the snow is crusted, blindingly white in the sun, a mortal danger to animals whose food supply it covers. A long sickle, a new moon, of ice begins to appear along the rim of Cape Cod Bay. There is crackling, grinding cold, in a day when we rise a little past the sun instead of ahead of it. The freezing nights, for some of the animals that have endured the winter so far, must be interminable, except for the rabbit, caught suddenly in the open by a great-horned owl. I found what was left of it in the woods--a burst of little bits of fur in the snow; the owl’s tracks; a mold left by the rabbit’s body. A hermit thrush dies of starvation, all its remnant food at winter’s end cut off by the snow. It is pathetically light, held in the hand, and when it is dissected only the tiniest patches of red meat show on either side of the breast bone. I find a dead eider duck on the shore. It may have been blown against a tree in the storm. One wing is broken, and the feathers buffed and thin from beating. After its feeding grounds are frozen over in an inlet farther down the Cape, a great blue heron dies on the snow-covered shores, wounding its neck in the last throes.