Under The Northern Lights by Alan Sullivan

Along the broad back of a great ridge the outline of a man moved slowly, tramping down the snow with wide-webbed shoes, whose symmetrical furrow stretched for leagues behind him. He leant forward as he walked, a tall figure muffled in a woollen tunic, the capote down over his hard blue eyes. The visible portion of his face was tanned a deep brown, his moustache a cake of ice, and the breath from his hot lungs spouted little jets of vapour into the tingling air.

All around the land was white, save where a scanty growth lined the gullies with thickets of spruce and Birch. Over it sighed the winds of the North, whose chilling touch crept down from the Arctic circle and laid a crystallised finger of silence on the Barren Lands. The snow had wrapped the sharp edges of every ridge in a sheer blanket that stretched for a thousand miles, undulating in slow and glistening waves to the hard line of a distant horizon. It shone--a domain of death--where so late the wild rose blossomed and the air throbbed with innumerable wings. The man halted, slackened his shoulders, and sat for a moment on the pack-sack. He had come twenty miles and another twenty remained to be traversed.