And now winter was coming down upon Rosebud in real earnest. The first 'cold snap,' as it is called, had caught our friends as they crossed the Rockies, and, intensified by the height at which they were travelling, had seemed very bitter indeed. After the cold snap, which only lasted from a week to ten days, came as it were an aftermath of summer, a second season of sunshine and delight, which the natives call the Indian summer. Snap began to think that the severities of a Canadian winter were all bunkum, invented as a background for all the terrible stories of the fur-traders of old days. This Indian summer was just the loveliest October weather which a healthy man could wish for, a little crisper and keener at night than our own Octobers, but in the day so bright, so clear, so sunny, that life (however hard the work) seemed to go to dance-music all day long. Later on, however, there began to be signs of a change. One by one and in little groups all the cattle had come in of their own accord from the distant ranges. Some of them had been feeding above the foot-hills on the sweet grass of the mountain slopes, where in two months' time even the bighorn would not be able to exist. As Snap rode out to shoot for the pot, or on any work about the ranche, he would meet fresh companies of them, feeding slowly downhill towards the low land and the river bottoms. They were in no hurry, picking the tenderest 'feed' as they strolled along, and camping every night wherever they happened to find themselves, but still pressing steadily on to the warmer lands below. As the beasts stopped and stared at the boy with great, solemn, brown eyes of inquiry, he used to wonder at them at least as much as they at him. How came it, he thought, that they knew the bitter white winter was coming, although the sun was still so bright, and the uplands flooded with golden light? Who told them? or did they remember from the years before? Nature, too, had put on her last robe but one. In a month, save for the dark green of the funereal pines, it would be white everywhere. Now, just for a season, there was colour everywhere as bright as rainbow tints, and as short-lived. The maples were clear gold or vivid crimson; the sugar maples often showing both colours side by side in one gracefully pointed leaf. The hazels were red and gold, or, like the long oval leaves of the sumach-bush, had already turned from brilliant lake to a dull, blackish purple. They were all ready to drop and die, but their death would be as beautiful and becoming as their birth in spring-time, when birds were mating and woods a tender green, or as their life among the flowers and cool, green shadows of the luxurious summer.