It was getting light the next morning when the reinforced party entered a belt of thicker timber where they first clearly realized the fury of the storm. The trees were small and sprang from a frozen muskeg, so that they could not be uprooted, but the gale had snapped the trunks and laid them low in swaths. Even in the spots where some had withstood its force the ground was strewn with split and broken branches, and to lee of them the snow had gathered in billowy drifts. The scene of ruin impressed the men, who were forced to make long rounds in search of a passage for the sled.
“About as fierce a blizzard as I remember,” Sergeant Lane remarked. “We were held up three days, and thought ourselves lucky in making a ravine with a steep bank; but the wind couldn’t have been quite so strong ba
