Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and
through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick
to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin
served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and
trudge far afield in the surrounding forest.
On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff
which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flats
in the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very
powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,
on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black
objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a
faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He
could see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woods
the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,
buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed
remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled
with this curiosity.
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