While the bleak, chill days rushed by Wanda prepared happily for the fine weather which would come, when the sun reflected back from many feet of fluffy snow would warm the air, when in the high, dry altitudes the sparkling, Christmassy world would become a rarely beautiful thing, when she could leave the house and penetrate deep into a solitude which was as different from the solitude of the summer forestland as day is from night. She brought down from the attic her own favourite pair of skis and saw that they were fit. The long slender bits of pine, light and graceful with their running grooves glistening, their turned up ends like Turks' slippers, she stood on end in the living room while she gave them a new coat of white shellac. Her snowshoe pole she tested, making sure that it had sustained no injury during its long banishment to the dark places of the attic, and that it could be trusted in the work she would call upon it to do. She gathered the winter out-door things which she had not used for two years, the white sweater that clung close to her slim, pliant body; the white tasseled hat, mitts, leggins, white bloomers. And then, when a blue and white, laughing day came, and the air was clear and warm, the branches of the trees sagging under their diamond pricked festoons of snow, she left the house, now in truth the White Huntress. Camera and field glasses went with her; for lunch a bit of jerked beef and a piece of hard chocolate. For to-day she began her winter work. Again she was hunting. The forests as she slipped through them were very still and seemed void of all the life that had swarmed here until the snows came. But she would see snow birds, she might find a coyote or a big snow-shoe rabbit. She would take pictures, too, such wintry pictures as she had never seen, the world locked in the embrace of winter, glistening icicles as big as her body, cliffs thrown into strange, grotesque shapes, fields of untracked white with perhaps the sweep of a stream seeming ink black against the dazzling white background. And she thrilled to the crunch of thin crust underfoot which yesterday's thaw and last night's freeze had formed, the whip of the dry air in her face, the exhilaration of the long, swift dash as she glided from the crest of some ridge, a silent, graceful creature, into the hollow beyond. Her body bent a little forward, her snow-shoe pole horizontal as a tight rope walker holds his balancing rod, the white world slid away beneath her, little sinks or humps in the apparent smoothness of the snow demanding the sudden leap which shot the blood tingling through the eager body. For the light skis with their three coats of shellac carried her down the steeper slopes with the wild speed of a bird skimming the winter whitened earth.