Cummins had gone to prospect a new trap-line, and was to sleep out the
first night. The second night he was still gone. On the third day came
the "Beeg Snow." It began at dawn, thickened as the day went, and
continued to thicken until it became that soft, silent deluge of white in
which no man dared venture a thousand yards from his door. The Aurora was
hidden. There were no stars in the sky at night. Day was weighted with a
strange, noiseless gloom. In all that wilderness there was not a creature
that moved. Sixty hours later, when visible life was resumed again, the
caribou, the wolf and the fox dug themselves up out of six feet of snow,
and found the world changed.
It was at the beginning of the "Beeg Snow" that Jan went to the woman's
cabin. He tapped upon her door with the timidity of a child, and when she
opened it, her great eyes glowing at him in wild questioning, her face
white with a terrible fear, there was a chill at his heart which choked
back what he had come to say. He walked in dumbly and stood with the snow
falling off him in piles, and when Cummins' wife saw neither hope nor
foreboding in his dark, set face she buried her face in her arms upon the
little table and sobbed softly in her despair. Jan strove to speak, but
the Cree in him drove back what was French and "just white," and he stood
in mute, trembling torture. "Ah, the Great God!" his soul was crying.
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