Winter—Sleeping in the Snow—A Night Alarm.

 

Summer passed away, autumn passed away, and winter came. So did Christmas, and so did Jasper’s marriage-day.

 

Now the reader must understand that there is a wonderful difference between the winter in that part of the North American wilderness¹ called Rupert’s land, and winter in our own happy island.

 

Winter out there is from six to eight months long. The snow varies from three to four feet deep, and in many places it drifts to fifteen or twenty feet deep. The ice on the lakes and rivers is sometimes above six feet thick; and the salt sea itself, in Hudson’s Bay, is frozen over to a great extent. Nothing like a thaw² takes place for many months at a time, and the frost is so intense that it is a matter of difficulty to prevent one’s-self from being frost-bitten. The whole country, during these long winter months, appears white, desolate³, and silent.

 

Yet a good many of the birds and animals keep moving about, though most of them do so at night, and do not often meet the eye of man. The bear goes to sleep all winter in a hole, but the wolf and the fox prowl about the woods at night. Ducks, geese, and plover⁴ no longer enliven the marshes⁵ with their wild cries; but white grouse⁶, or ptarmigan, fly about in immense flocks, and arctic hares make many tracks in the deep snow. Still, these are quiet creatures, and they scarcely break the deep dead silence of the forests in winter.

 

At this period the Indian and the fur-trader wrap themselves in warm dresses of deer-skin, lined with the thickest flannel⁷, and spend their short days in trapping and shooting. At night the Indian piles logs on his fire to keep out the frost, and adds to the warmth of his skin-tent by heaping snow up the outside of it all round. The fur-trader puts double window-frames and double

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