WINTER AND SPRING Snow came as it comes to us in the Northland--a blinding fall, heavy and monotonous--and in forty-eight hours the Johnstown Road was blocked. Followed a day of dazzling sunshine and intense cold, which set our timbers cracking; and the snow, like finest flour, creaked under our snow-shoes. All the universe had turned to blue and silver; and the Vlaie Water ran fathomless purple between its unstained snows. But that night the clouds returned and winds grew warmer, and soon the skies opened with feathery white volleys, and the big, thick flakes stormed down again, obliterating alike the work of nature and of man. Summer House was covered to the veranda eaves. We made shovels and cleared the roofs and broke paths to stable and well. Here, between dazzling ramparts, we lived and moved and had our being, week after week; and every new snow-storm piled higher our palisades and buried the whole land under one vast white pall. Vlaie Water froze three feet solid; fierce winds piled the ice with gigantic drifts so that no man could mark the course of the creeks any more; and a vast white desolation stretched away to the mountains, broken only by naked hard-wood forests or by the interminable ocean of the pines weighted deep with snow. Only when a crust came were we at any pains to set a watch against a war party from the Canadas. But none arrived; no signal smoke stained the peaks; nothing living stirred on that dead white waste save those little grey and whining birds which creep all day up and down tree-trunks, or a sudden gusty flight of snow-birds, which suddenly arrive from nowhere and are gone as suddenly. Once a white owl with yellow eyes sat upon the ridge-pole of our barn; but our pullets were safe within, and Penelope drove him away with snowballs. The deer yarded on Maxon; lynx-tracks circled our house and barn, and we sometimes heard old tassel-ears a-miauling on the Stacking Ridge. And, toward the end of February, there were two panthers that left huge cat-prints across the drifts on the Johnstown Road; but they took no toll of our sheep, which were safe in a stone fold, though the oaken door to it bore marks of teeth and claws, where the pumas had striven hard to break in and do murder. Save when a crust formed and we took our turns on guard, my Indian rolled himself in bear-furs by the kitchen oven, and like a bear he slept there until hunger awoke him long enough to gorge for another stretch of sleep. Nick and I took axes to the woods and drew logs on a sledge to split for fire use. Our tasks, too, kept us busy feeding our live creatures, fetching water, keeping paths open, and fishing through the ice. In idler intervals we carved devices upon our powder-horns, cured deer-skins in the Oneida fashion, boiled pitch and mended our canoe, fashioned paddles, poles, and shafts for fish-spears, strung snow-shoes, built a fine sledge out of ash and hickory, and made Kaya draw us on the crust.