Sam could guess the hour by the paler patch of sky where the sun was hidden. It was one o’clock, then three, then five, and dusk again closed in, and cold more bitter. He felt that he was not walking fast or getting far; in six hours he doubted that he had covered twenty miles. The wind became more savage after the sun went down. Only squaws, he thought, could be as completely wild and uncontrolled as a wind. It was absolute raving lunacy all around him, something sent by the English down from Canada, to terrorize and desolate American land. It came shrieking and howling across the Missouri and then swept across the wastes, gathering madness and violence as the night deepened; and with his emotions as close to panic as they had ever been, Sam sat, his back to the winds, the robe over his back, and wondered what he could do. Job had been tested with afflictions that became harder and harder to bear, until the goaded and tortured man had cried out that he could endure no more. But he had endured more. Sam grimly told himself that he was being tested with one of the mightiest winds from the Creator’s wind chamber. He would do all that a man could do, and then do more.

There in the deep night he sat, with the winds howling against him, their Canada cold pouring over him like an atmosphere of ice. He still knew which way was east. He would rise and go again; he would walk as long as he knew the direction and could lift his feet; and then he would make mittens of the robe and he would crawl. If he lost the direction he would stop and dig in for the night, and in the morning he would crawl again. The sky above him was only an ocean of swift winds, with not a hint of moon or stars; the world around him was riven by forces that only the strongest could stand against. Bending to the left and into it, he went on, the knife inside a fold of robe and one hand clasping its handle, his feet numbed; his face turned to the right and away from the driving insanity of the blizzard; his half-frozen legs stepping forward, on and on. Until the wind changed he would know which way was east, but blizzards had a way of becoming cyclonic vortexes in which all directions were lost.

Now and then he stopped, knelt, faced south, and made a hole in the snow; and he then sat in the hole so that he would not be blown away, while he took off the moccasins and massaged his feet. He tried to keep his senses alive to his physical condition, for he knew that persons could be seduced by numbing cold into a tranquil state of mind that thought all was well. He knew that he was half frozen but he could move all his toes; after vigorous rubbing he could feel a pale warmth in his feet; and moving from side to side, he could feel a little sensation in his rump. He twisted his ears and nose. Then he walked again, struggling on through the night, as a man will when all his being is fixed on one thing; he was numbed almost to his marrow and hunger pangs were like violent massaging of his stomach and bowels; and his mind was not as clear as he wanted it to be, but he went on and on. Mountain men had tried to figure out why in a blizzard a man went round and round, while convinced that he was following a straight course. One said it was because a man was heavier on one side than the other, that if you were to cut a man down the middle from his head to his crotch you’d find one side of him five pounds heavier than the other, for the same reason that one side of his face was fuller and one ear was larger. Face a tree two hundred yards distant, shut your eyes and walk toward it, and you’d find yourself fifty feet on the right of it or the left. An obscene remark had then been made about a man’s stones, and some of the men had laughed, and Windy Bill had said that might be the reason.

His eyes almost closed against the winds, his head bent, the knife now tied into a corner of the robe, his hands massaging one another, Sam went on and on, until past midnight. He knew now that the winds would howl all night and all the next day. This country from the Missouri east to the Black Hills and south to the Yellowstone was the winter playground of Canada’s winds; laden with ice and menace, they came like tumultuous oceans of zero-breath, down from the great northern mountains; and after shrieking over this broad desolation they swept up the elk basins between the Bitterroot and the Bighorns, and the Bighorns and the Black Hills; and roared all the way south to the Sangre de Cristo, the great sand dunes, and the San Juans.

He guessed that was how it was, for he was forcing his mind to think and he was keeping before him the lesson of Job. His father had read this to his children. God had said that Job was a fine man, and Satan had said, Yeah, but you have built a fence of love around him and what does he strive against? God then turned Job over to Satan to test the stuff he was made of; and murderers came and fell on Job’s servants, burned his sheep, and took away his camels; and then came a terrible wind from the wilderness that razed his house and killed his sons and daughters. All that was only the beginning. Me, Sam told himself, I am a wee mite hungry and a wee mite cold, so shall I shave my head and fall to the ground? Often he had heard his father utter Satan’s words, "Skin for skin, all that a man has will he give for his life." Satan was a politician. A man would not give his children, his wife, his friends, his honor, or the defenseless into the powers of evil. Sam dug inside his shirt for his harp and warmed it by turning it over and over in his hands. Then, as he plodded along, he tried to play into the winds, choosing first the favorite song of Mozart’s mother and of his mother. Taking the harp from his mouth, he cried into the winds, "Rejoice, O my heart!" He tried to play the finale of a sonata and a tender melody of man-woman love, while thinking of Lotus. Job, the idiot, had cursed his Creator. Job had wished he had died at birth or was sunk in eternal sleep, for there even the wicked put away their vices, and the troubled and the weary were at rest. There the prisoners lay together in peace and heard not the voice of the tyrant; the famous and the forgotten mingled their dust; and the servant leapt to his master’s call no more. How his father had loved to declaim the bold words! Sam heard in the winds, "For wrath killeth the foolish man, and envy slayeth the silly one." Poor old Job, he was so tormented that he longed only for death—"Oh, that God would let loose his hand and cut me off!" For the first time in his life Sam had an inkling of what Job’s cries meant; for as he staggered forward, sick with hunger and weakness and frozen to his marrow, he found himself thinking that rest was supreme among the good things of life.

He sensed the warning in time. His first act was to try to look round him but he could see only the wild gray terrors sweeping by. He might be twenty feet from, trees, or miles; possibly before him there was a deep sheltered cove, full of the soft spillings from the winds. He sank to his haunches, swept the new snow away, and with the knife cut a round lid in the frozen crust. He lifted it away and plunged his arm down, and almost wept with joy when he realized that the snow here was deep. Reaching down, he pushed it back under the crust or scooped it out, until he could enter the hole, feet first. He pulled the robe after him. Then he kicked and beat at the soft snow under the crust to force it back and away, so that he could draw down out of the wind. He thought he must be in a ravine, or in a drift against trees or a bluff. On his knees he kept pushing the snow away from him and back.

It seemed amazingly warm down under the crust, but he was so sunk in weariness that he did not know his labor had made his blood race. The earth under him was not frozen; this meant that a good cover of snow had fallen, and remained, before the first hard frost. Clearing away the snow so that he could spread the robe, he sat on it, took off the mocassins, and massaged his ankles and feet. He was exhausted but he had not admitted it. More than anything else he wanted sleep but he knew that if he were to fall asleep he would never awaken. While dimly thinking of the matter he sensed that staying awake would demand more than an effort of his will. Overhead, he could hear the rushing of winds at fifty or sixty miles an hour, and when he put an ear to the earth he could still hear them, as if they were underground. They were not carrying much snow but they were filling the hole; after a while it seemed almost cozy where he sat, for no breath of wind touched him. If only he had four warm robes he would sleep for a day and a night and then walk to Kate’s shack in a few minutes!