I learned to look out for this sign, and I
verily believe that, had I not learned that lesson right
now, I should never have reached the creek which was
still four or five miles distant.
The huge mound in the lee of which I was stopping was a
matter of two hundred yards away; nearer to it the snow
was considerably deeper; and since it presented an
appearance very characteristic of Prairie bush-drifts,
I shall describe it in some detail. Apparently the winds
had first bent over all the stems of the clump; for
whenever I saw one of them from the north, it showed a
smooth, clean upward sweep. On the south side the snow
first fell in a sheer cliff; then there was a hollow
which was partly filled by a talus-shaped drift thrown
in by the counter currents from the southern pit in which
we were stopping; the sides of this talus again showed
the marks that reminded of those left by the spoon when
butter is roughly stroked into the shape of a pyramid.
The interesting parts of the structure consisted in the
beetling brow of the cliff and the roof of the cavity
underneath. The brow had a honeycombed appearance; the
snow had been laid down in layers of varying density (I
shall discuss this more fully in the next chapter when
we are going to look in on the snow while it is actually
at work); and the counter currents that here swept upward
in a slanting direction had bitten out the softer layers,
leaving a fine network of little ridges which reminded
strangely of the delicate fretwork-tracery in
wind-sculptured rock--as I had seen it in the Black Hills
in South Dakota.
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