[Gutenberg 23551] • Who Crosses Storm Mountain? / 1911

The wind stirred in the weighted pines; the snow lay on the ground. Here

and there on its smooth, white expanse footprints betokened the woodland

gentry abroad. In the pallid glister of the moon, even amid the sparse,

bluish shadows of the leafless trees, one might discriminate the

impression of the pronged claw of the wild turkey, the short, swift

paces of the mink, the padded, doglike paw of the wolf. A progress of a

yet more ravening suggestion was intimated in great hoof-marks leading

to the door of a little log cabin all a-crouch in the grim grip of

winter and loneliness and poverty on the slope of the mountain, among

heavy, outcropping ledges of rock and beetling, overhanging crags. With

icy ranges all around as far as the eye could reach, with the vast,

instarred, dark sky above, it might seem as if sorrow, the world, the

law could hardly take account of so slight a thing, so remote. But

smoke was slowly stealing up from its stick-and-clay chimney, and its

clapboarded roof sheltered a group with scarcely the heart to mend the

fire.