It was a still afternoon.  A silvery brightness beyond the mountain crests far to the southward showed where the low winter sun was sweeping past on its flat arc.  The sky to the north was empty, colorless.  There had been no wind for some time, and now the firs sagged beneath burdens of white; even the bare birch branches carried evenly balanced inch-deep layers of snow.  Underfoot, the earth was smothered in a feathery shroud as light, as clean as the purest swan’s-down, and into it Pierce’s moccasins sank to the ankles.  He walked as silently as a ghost.  Through this queer, breathless hush the sounds of chopping, of distant voices, of an occasional dog barking followed him as he went deeper into the woods.

Time was when merely to be out in the forest on such a day would have pleased him, but gone entirely was that pleasure, and in its place there came now an irritation at the physical discomfort it entailed.  He soon began to perspire freely, too freely; nevertheless, there was no glow to his body; he could think only of easy-chairs and warm stoves.  He wondered what ailed him.  Nothing could be more abhorrent than this, he told himself.  Health was a valuable thing, no doubt, and he agreed that no price was too high to pay for it—­no price, perhaps, except dull, uninteresting exercise of this sort.  He was upon the point of turning back when the trail suddenly broke out into a natural clearing and he saw something which challenged his attention.

To the left of the path rose a steep bank, and beyond that the bare, sloping mountain-side.  In the shelter of the bank the snow had drifted deep, but, oddly enough, its placid surface was churned up, as if from an explosion or some desperate conflict that had been lately waged.  It had been tossed up and thrown down.  What caused him to stare was the fact that no footprints were discernible—­nothing except queer, wavering parallel streaks that led downward from the snowy turmoil to the level ground below.  They resembled the tracks of some oddly fashioned sled.

Pierce halted, and with bent head was studying the phenomenon, when close above him he heard the rush of a swiftly approaching body; he looked up just in time to behold an apparition utterly unexpected, utterly astounding.  Swooping directly down upon him with incredible velocity was what seemed at first glance to be a bird-woman, a valkyr out of the pages of Norse mythology.  Wingless she was, yet she came like the wind, and at the very instant Pierce raised his eyes she took the air almost over his head—­ quite as if he had startled her into an upward flight.  Upon her feet was a pair of long, Norwegian skees, and upon these she had scudded down the mountain-side; where the bank dropped away she had leaped, and now, like a meteor, she soared into space.  This amazing creature was clad in a blue-and-white toboggan suit, short skirt, sweater jacket, and knitted cap.  As she hung outlined against the wintry sky Pierce caught a snap-shot glimpse of a fair, flushed, youthful face set in a ludicrous expression of open-mouthed dismay at sight of him.  He heard, too, a high-pitched cry, half of warning, half of fright; the next instant there was a mighty upheaval of snow, an explosion of feathery white, as the human projectile landed, then a blur of blue-and-white stripes as it went rolling down the declivity.