Outside, the night and the storm swallowed him at once.  Before he had gone fifty feet the house was out of sight.  Then, entering the forest of balsam firs, the force of the wind was lessened, and he made good time up the first part of the grade.  There would probably be no use for the snowshoes in this region of broken shrubbery before he came to the timberline.

He swept on with a lengthening stride.  He knew this part of the country like a book, of course, and he seldom stumbled, save when he came out into a clearing and the wind smote at him from an unexpected angle.  In one of these clearings he stopped and took stock of his position.  Far away to the west and the south, the head of Scalped Mountain was lost in dim, rushing clouds.  He must make for that goal.

Progress became less easy almost at once.  The trees that grew in this elevated region were not tall enough to act as wind breaks; they were hardly more than shrubs a great deal of the time, and merely served to force him into detours around dense hedges.  Sometimes, in a clearing, he found himself staggering to the knees in a compacted drift of snow; sometimes an immense sheet of snow was picked up by the wind and flung in his face like a blanket.

Indeed the cold and the snow were nothing compared with the wind.  It was now reaching the proportions of a westerly storm of the first magnitude.  Off the towering slopes above, it came with the chill of the snow and with flying bits of sand, scooped up from around the base of trees, or with a shower of twigs.  Many a time he had to throw up his arms across his face before he leaned and thrust on into the teeth of the blast.

But he was growing accustomed to seeing through this veil of snow and thick darkness.  All things were dreamlike in dimness, of course, but he could make out terrific cloud effects, as the clouds gushed over the summit and down the slope a little way like the smoke of enormous guns; and again a pyramid of mist was like a false mountain before him, a mountain that took on movement and rushed to overwhelm him, only to melt away and become simply a shadow among shadows above his head.

Once or twice before the dawn, he rested, not from weariness perhaps, but from lack of breath, turning his back to the west and bowing his head.  Walking into the wind it had become positively difficult to draw breath!

Still it gained power incredibly.  Up the side of Scalped Mountain it was a steady weight pressing against him rather than a wind.  And now and then, when the weight relaxed, he stumbled forward on his knees.  For there was now hardly any shelter.  He was approaching the timberline where trees stand as high as a man and little higher.