Friday.
This Is A Piteous Day, Quite Black, Freezing Hard, And With A
Fierce North-East Wind.
The absence of sunshine here, where it
is nearly perpetual, has a very depressing effect, and all the
scenery appears in its grimness of black and gray.
We have lost
three horses, including Birdie, and have nothing to entice them
with, and not an animal to go and drive them in with. I put my
great mare in the corral myself, and Mr. Kavan put his in
afterwards and secured the bars, but the wolves were holding a
carnival again last night, and we think that the horses were
scared and stampeded, as otherwise they would not have leaped the
fence. The men are losing their whole day in looking for them.
On their return they said that they had seen Mr. Nugent returning
to his cabin by the other side and the lower ford of the
Thompson, and that he had "an awfully ugly fit on him," so that
they were glad that he did not come near us. The evening is
setting in sublime in its blackness. Late in the afternoon I
caught a horse which was snuffing at the sheaf oats, and had a
splendid gallop on the Longmount trail with the two great hunting
dogs. In returning, in the grimness of the coming storm, I had
that view of the park which I saw first in the glories of an
autumn sunset. Life was all dead; the dragon-flies no longer
darted in the sunshine, the cotton-woods had shed their last
amber leaves, the crimson trailers of the wild vines were bare,
the stream itself had ceased its tinkle and was numb in fetters
of ice, a few withered flower stalks only told of the brief
bright glory of the summer.
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