The Air Is Full Of Stinging Shot,
And At Ten Yards The Trees Are Invisible.
The foot slides on a reef,
polished and black as obsidian, where the wind has skinned an exposed
corner of road down to the dirt ice of early winter.
The next step ends
hip-deep and over, for here an unseen wall is banking back the rush of
the singing drifts. A scarped slope rises sheer across the road. The
wind shifts a point or two, and all sinks down, like sand in the
hour-glass, leaving a pot-hole of whirling whiteness. There is a lull,
and you can see the surface of the fields settling furiously in one
direction - a tide that spurts from between the tree-boles. The hollows
of the pasture fill while you watch; empty, fill, and discharge anew.
The rock-ledges show the bare flank of a storm-chased liner for a
moment, and whitening, duck under. Irresponsible snow-devils dance by
the lee of a barn where three gusts meet, or stagger out into the open
till they are cut down by the main wind. At the worst of the storm there
is neither Heaven nor Earth, but only a swizzle into which a man may be
brewed. Distances grow to nightmare scale, and that which in the summer
was no more than a minute's bare-headed run, is half an hour's gasping
struggle, each foot won between the lulls. Then do the heavy-timbered
barns talk like ships in a cross-sea, beam working against beam.
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