He stood from morning until night hewing down the trees, which had gotten their lusty growth from the graves of their own kind.

Their roots were sunken deep among and twined about the very bones of their fathers which helped make up the rich frozen soil of the great swamp.

The crusty snow was three feet deep; the tall blackberry vines were hooped with snow, set fast at either end like snares: it was hard work making one's way through them.

The snow was over the heads of those dried weeds which did not blow away in the autumn, but stayed on their stalks with that persistency of life that outlives death; but all the sturdy bushes, which were almost trees, the swamp-pinks and the wild-roses, waxed gigantic, lost their own outlines, and stretched out farther under their loads of snow.
Barney hewed wood in the midst of this white tangle of trees and bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away.
When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a semblance of life.

If a squirrel chattered and leaped between some white boughs, he started as if some dead thing had come to life, for it seemed like the voice and motion of death rather than of life.
Half a mile away at the right other wood-cutters were at work.