But the days when I could rove the mountains were days of comparative happiness. Too often the trails, blocked by the deep soft drifts or the ice-packs, were impassable for one so poorly equipped as I; and too often the blizzards raged. Besides, the daylight hours were but few, since the sun-excluding mountain masses made the dawn late and the evening early; and often the tedium seemed unendurable when I sat in my cabin at night, watching the flames that danced and crackled in the fireplace, and dreaming of Yasma and the spring, or of things still further away, and old friends and home. At times, scarcely able to bear the waiting, I would pace back and forth like a caged beast, back and forth, from the fire to the woodpile, and from the woodpile to the fire. At other times, more patient, I would amuse myself by trying to kindle some straw with bits of flint, or by returning to the ways of my boyhood and whittling sticks into all manner of grotesque designs. And occasionally, when the mood was upon me, I would strain my eyes by the flickering log blaze, confiding my diary to the notebook I had picked up in our old camp beyond the mountain. For the purposes of this diary, I had but one pencil, which gradually dwindled to a stub that I could hardly hold between two fingers--and with the end of the pencil, late in the winter, the diary also came to a close. Although this record was written merely as a means of whiling away the hours and was not intended for other eyes, I find upon opening it again that it describes my plight more vividly than would be possible for me after the passage of years; and I am tempted to quote a typical memorandum. As I peer at that curiously cramped and tortured handwriting, my eyes pause at the following: "Monday, December 29th. Or it may be Tuesday the 30th, for I fear I have forgotten to mark one of the daily notches on the cabin walls, by which I keep track of the dates. All day I was forced to remain in my cabin, for the season's worst storm was raging. Only once did I leave shelter, and that was to get water. But the stream was frozen almost solid, and it was a task to pound my way through the ice with one of the crude native axes. Meanwhile the gale beat me in the face till my cheeks were raw; the snow came down in a mist of pellets that half blinded me; and a chill crept through my clothes till my very skin seemed bared to the ice-blast. I was fifteen minutes in thawing after I had crept back to the cabin. But even within the cabin there seemed no way to keep warm, for the wind rushed in through cracks that I could not quite fill; and the fire, though I heaped it with fuel, was feeble against the elemental fury outside.