Her axe was gone.

If the mountain men could have watched her now they would have spun another legend around her name. She got to her feet. Almost frozen, she rubbed her hands over each other as her strange eyes peered into the hole. She moved back to see if she had been standing over the axe, and when convinced that it had vanished into the river she did not hesitate but lay by the hole and reached into it with her right arm, and let her head and shoulders slip down little by little until her hand was in the water. She did not know that she was above an eddy whose  black waters were six or eight feet deep. If she could have gone through the hole she would have entered the water to search for the axe.

After she had struggled back from the hole she was almost rigid, and hand and arm were numbed and senseless. They never recovered from the exposure. The loss of the axe was for her a bitter loss. Day and night she grieved over it and went again and again to the river to look for it, and in desperation she tried to build a fire to melt snow. Failing in this, and convinced that her plants would die, she sat, trembling and half weeping, bundled against the cold, her attention divided between the sky and the garden.

She did not know and during these years had not known the month, much less the week or day. Such things as Thanksgiving Day and Christmas she had forgotten. It was two days before Christmas in this bitter year that the second heaviest snow of the season began to fall. The first three days it was a quiet storm of the kind Sam loved, and day and night Kate sat by the door, looking up through a dusk of whirling flakes. Her path to the river was lost and all trails were lost. An hour or two each day with bare hands she pulled the snow back from her doorway and the bedding, and back from the sages where her children knelt; but she was so starved and cold and enfeebled that she had forgotten her flowers. Her consciousness was closing like a shutter but it would never close on her children before she died, or on the moon in whose light they came. On three sides of the cabin the snow at the end of the third day was over five feet deep and it was that deep on the roof. Time and again she tried to follow her old path to the river but always turned back, exhausted and weeping. Time and again she searched through the cabin for the axe. Then memory of it was gone too, and of the water pail, a d the path, the river. But for hunger pangs she would have lost all memory of food.

After three days of heavy snowfall the weather turned colder and for a week the cold steadily deepened, The northern winds came down. Sam would have said that at first they came in the opening phrases of an overture, or in a prodigal pouring of a dozen overtures out of the great northern ice caverns. They would take their time about it, these winds, for they had Beethoven’s patience, and his skill in devising variations on main themes and in building crescendo on crescendo. If Sam had been in the Wind River country, or here with Kate, where the winds were flinging their wild music headlong, he would have thought that the Creator was about to use all His instruments in a major symphony. Kate was barely aware of it. After the snow was up to her roof and her path was lost and the world all around her was winter white she was hardly conscious of the winds sculpturing magnificent snow dunes. At first they gave her only a little trouble. She daily pawed snow back from the sages, so that her children could kneel there if the moon came; and the first gentle winds played around the clearing she had made and sprayed it with snow gems but did not till it. After the opening chords of the first movement there were cold clear announcements from the horns, far in the north, and by morning of the third day of winds the first movement was in full flow. By noon the clearing round the plants had been blown level full, but neither in volume nor intensity was the wind more than a token of what it would be. It was a kind of molto adagio. The second movement would be of such percussive violence, with crescendo piled on crescendo, that her cabin would tremble and hum in the furious winter music, and her efforts to clear~the snow away from the plants would be only pathetic flurries in the cyclones of white that enveloped her.

But she persevered and waited for the moon. It rose, round and frozen and wintry wan, and appeared and disappeared as the winds hurled curtains of snow across its face. The next morning the temperature had fallen to ten below zero, and in the next few days it fell fast, as the second movement came in. The first had been a vast playful statement of themes, as the winds rearranged the snowface of the earth; and if Kate had had any interest in the marvels of a northern winter she could have looked in any direction and seen the buxom contoured sculpturing of the drifts, the great massifs and mesas of winter white, as Canada hurled its insane genius over the scene. It was a world of superlative purity and loveliness, but Kate could only sit, mute, shivering, half dead; or struggle desperately with the immense drifts that had been flung against the north wall and around the corners; or kneel and dig down to try to find her old snowpath. After the cold became more intense the snow surface was frozen in jewels, and diamond-ice hurled against her face stung like flame. The winds, now denied the joy of sculpturing, seemed to put aside the softer instruments, such as cello, viola, and flute, and to bring in the horns and trumpets and kettledrums. The second movement was allegro mounting swiftly to presto: though for Kate it was only wild winter shrieking, a sharp ear could have heard delightful variations on several themes, as the winter’s instruments poured their marvelous harmonies down the valleys and across the prairies and over the high white mountains. Everything in their path the winds played upon; and when they found an object such as Kate’s hut, or a naked stone ledge, or a flock of tall shuddering cottonwood trees, the voices would change in both intensity and pitch, and sometimes leap up and down an octave or two, as they modeled the themes to fit the curves and contours of the world. Or when wild and high, and climbing with shrill nerve-shattering energy to the highest notes, they struck the dimples of dells and ravines, the cellos and violas would take over, the harps and flutes, and small soft melodies were played in wind eddies under overhanging snow-laden plants and in the blind stone-walled canyons. Sam would have loved it; shouting with all his being to make himself heard, he would have played one of the themes over and over in different keys, as in the third overture to Leonore, and imagined that his melodies were small vocal pockets riding the winds. He would have gone singing and dancing over the earth, and returned, when weary, to eat four elk steaks and sit by the fire with his pipe and praise the Lord.

The fiercer harmonies and wilder movements, even the major themes, were not for the female, whose nest-budded instincts compelled her to seek the tranquil. By the end of the second movement, when the temperature had sunk to more than thirty below, Kate was so numbed and lifeless that she could barely move. Hunger pains would force her, perhaps once but never twice in twenty-four hours, to crawl out of the pile of bedding and over to the north wall, where in the gloom her cold hands would feel around and over and through the things there. There was nothing she could chew, except sugar or flour, and the mice and insects had destroyed most of those. There was dried elk and deer flesh. There were raisins in skin bags, frozen as hard as stones. She would take back to the bed a little fruit and a chunk of meat; she would lay them on the hard frozen earth and after crawling into the pile of bedding try to wrap it evenly all around her; and she would then feel over the ground until her hand came to the food. She would put three or four raisins into her mouth and for ten or fifteen minutes suck at them; the meat she could neither bite nor break, and so had to put her teeth and lips over an edge of it and try to warm and soften it and suck nourishment out of it. There was no hurry; she had all day and night for this one simple task.