The driving rains of the fall gave
way to January snows. But the frost took no more than a tentative
nibble now and then. Far up on the mountains the drifts piled deep,
and winter mists blew in clammy wraiths across the shoulders of the
hills. From those high, cold levels, the warmth of day and the frosts
that gnawed in chill darkness started intermittent slides rumbling,
growling as they slipped swiftly down steep slopes, to end with a
crash at the bottom of the hill or in the depths of a gorge. But the
valley itself suffered no extremes of weather. The river did not
freeze. It fell to a low level, but not so low that Hollister ever
failed to shift his cedar bolts from chute mouth to mill. There was
seldom so much snow that his crew could not work. There was growing
an appreciable hole in the heart of his timber limit. In another year
there would be nothing left of those great cedars that were ancient
when the first white man crossed the Rockies, nothing but a few
hundred stumps.
With the coming of midwinter a somnolent period seemed also to occur
in Hollister's affairs.
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