And it was well in Snap's first year that such ample provision had been made, for not only did the snow fall continuously for many days, but it packed, thus preventing the beasts from getting at the sun-dried, self-cured prairie hay below. In the bitterest weather Snap and the other men had to go out and feed; had to visit the different bands sheltering in the coulees and hollows of the foot-hills; look alter the young and the feeble; get the beasts out of the timber, where, if left alone, they would shiver and starve rather than face the bitter wind which drove them back from the feeding-ground on the bare lands below; keep an eye on the coyotes and wolves; and perform a hundred other duties which required strength and hardihood, and which were certain either 'to kill a boy or make a man,' as Wharton put it. Nature must have meant Snap for a cowboy. His long, lean figure, broad shoulders, and red-brown skin made him look a typical cowboy, almost before he was one. Enduring as a wolf, he made up by staying-power what he lacked in muscles, and day by day these developed through constant use. The severe weather had brought down other beasts from the hills besides the patient oxen. Now and again, as Snap went his rounds, he saw in the snow a track into which both his own feet would go without destroying its outline. Sometimes, after following this track for a while, he would find patches of blood on the trail, and then a dead steer, torn by the huge claws and mangled by the teeth of 'old Ephraim,' as the trappers used to call the grizzly. If the beast had been killed some time, there would be other tracks near--wolf and coyote--showing that others had finished what the fierce king of the forest had begun. A dose of arsenic hid in the flesh that was left would generally enable the cowboys to cry quits with the wolves, and go some way towards compensating for the death of the steer by the acquisition of three or four handsome skins, but the grizzly himself never touched a 'doctored carcase.' When Christmas came round it brought letters for Snap which kept his imagination busy all day. One was from the Admiral, another from the little mother, and a third from the guardian. The Admiral's accompanied a pair of field-glasses which had belonged to the dear old fellow for ages, and through which he had looked over many a stormy sea and sunny land. Through them he had seen the edges of all the world, the ports of every country, the shattered, shot-torn rigging of the enemy's fleet, and perhaps the powdered faces of many a European prima donna. 'Now,' he wrote, 'they are no good to me. Even these glasses won't help you to see through a London fog, and it's hardly respectable for the Chairman of the 'Company associated for the Culture and Civilisation of Puffin Islands' to be seen at a theatre. So, Snap, I send them to you. I wish I could look through them, my boy, and see you tending the cattle on a thousand hills.'