Beyond it rose the spruce forest, black and forbidding.

Along its nearer edges stood hushed walls of tamarack, bowed in the smothering clutch of snow and ice, shut in by impenetrable gloom.
A huge white owl flitted out of this rim of blackness, then back again, and its first quavering hoot came softly, as though the mystic hour of silence had not yet passed for the night-folk.

The snow of the day had ceased, hardly a breath of air stirred the ice-coated twigs of the trees.

Yet it was bitter cold--so cold that a man, remaining motionless, would have frozen to death within an hour.
Suddenly there was a break in the silence, a weird, thrilling sound, like a great sigh, but not human--a sound to make one's blood run faster and fingers twitch on rifle-stock.

It came from the gloom of the tamaracks.