Lost Chief was lovely in the summer with its crystal glory of color on hill and plain.  But Lost Chief in winter was awe-inspiring in its naked splendor.  Dead Line Peak and Falkner’s Peak, barren save for the great blue snows and for the black shadows that crept up and down their tremendous flanks, were separated from each other by a long, narrow, slowly rising valley.  Down this valley rushed a tiny brook whose murmur the bitterest weather could not quite still.  Along this brook grew quivering aspens, and beside it coyotes kept open a little trail.  Along this trail, Doug set his traps, as well as up on the wall of the mountains where lynx-cats and wolverine were hid.

Each day at noon, mounted on the Moose, with Prince at heel, he rode the circuit of the traps, seldom reaching home until long after supper was cleared away.  There were days when, on leaving the ranch for the long, bitter-cold ride, it seemed to Douglas that he never could come back again, that the pain of living in the same house with Judith in her girlish indifference was to be endured no longer.  The primitive intimacy in which the family dwelt made every hour at home a sort of torture to him, a torture that he did not wish to forego yet that he scarcely could endure.  One cannot say how much of Douglas’ self-control was due to innate refinement, how much to expediency, how much to the male power of inhibition when fighting to win the love of a woman.

But, whatever the cause, Douglas was developing a power of self-control possessed by no other man in the valley.  It made him, even at eighteen, a little grim, a little lonely, a little abstracted.  And he rode his traps like a man in a dream.  He thought much, but not constantly, of Judith; though she perfumed all his thoughts.  For the most part he pondered on the blank mystery of life and on the enigma of love, which to him seemed far more productive of pain than of joy.  Little by little, he found himself eager to get into the hills.  Quite consciously he left the ranch each day with the thought that when he reached the crest of old Falkner’s lower shoulder, where his lynx trap was set, and beheld the unspeakable strength and purity of the far-flung ranges, to whose vastness the Lost Chief peaks were but foothills, he would find a wordless peace.

And thus the winter slipped away and blue-birds dipped again in the spring beyond the corral.  And again alfalfa perfumed the alkaline dust that followed the birds into the Reserve; and then again, frost laid waste the struggling gardens of high altitudes; and for another winter Doug followed traps, varying the monotony by getting out pine-logs for his ranch house.