Dawn found him at the edge of the tree line.  He flung himself on his face, his head on his arms, to rest and wait until the treacherous time of dawn should have passed.  While the day grew steadily his heart sank.  He needed the rest, but the cold bit into him while he lay extended, and the peril of the summit would be before him for his march of the day.  The wind mourned over him as if it anticipated his defeat.  Never had there been such wind, he thought.  It screamed above him.  It dropped away in sudden lulls of more appalling silence.  Then, far off, he would hear a wave of the storm begin, wash across a crest, thunder in a canyon, and then break on the timberline with a prolonged and mighty roaring.  Those giant approaches made him hold his breath, and when the wave of confusion passed, he found himself often breathless.

Day came.  He was on the very verge of the line with a dense fence of stunted trees just before him and the wilderness of snow beyond, sloping up to the crest, outlined in white against the solid gray sky.  The Spartans of the forest were around him—­fir, pine, spruce, birch, and trembling little aspens up there among the stoutest.  All were of one height, clean-shaven by the volleys of the wind-driven sand and pebbles that clipped off any treetop that aspired above the mass.  In solid numbers was their salvation, and they grew dense as grass, two feet high on the battlefront.  They were carved by that wind, for all storms came here out of the west, and the storm face of every tree was denuded of branches.  To the east the foliage streamed away.  Even in calm weather those trees spoke of storm.

Bull Hunter sat up to put on his snowshoes.  It was a white world below him and above.  Winter, which a day before had vanished, now came back with a rush off the summits, where its snows were still piled.  Again the heart of the big man quaked.  Down in the hollow, over that ridge, was the house of the Campbells.  They would be getting up now.  Joe would be making the fire, and Harry slicing the bacon.  It made a cheerful picture to Bull.  He could close his eyes and hear the fire snap and see the stove steam with smoke through every fissure before the draft caught in the chimney.  From the shed came the neigh of Maggie, calling softly to him.

He shook his head with a groan, stood up, and strode out of the timber into the summit lands.  It was a great desert.  Never could it be construed as a place for life.  Even lichens were almost out of place here, and what folly could lead a man across the shifting snows?  But to be called a man, to be admired in silence, to be asked for opinions, to be deferred to—­this was a treasure worth any price!  He bowed himself to the wind again and made for the summit with the peculiar stride which a man must use with snowshoes.

He dared not slacken his efforts now.  The cold had been increasing, and to pause meant peril of freezing.  It was a highly electrified air, and the result was a series of maddening mirages.  He stumbled over solid rocks where nothing seemed to be in his way; and again what seemed a rock of huge size was nothing at all.  Bull discovered that what seemed firm ground beneath him, as he started to round a precipice, might after all be the effect of the mirage.