The Sojourner by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

On a cold December morning Ase Linden paced slowly, studying them, the acres whose crops must soon be planned for. A dusting of granular snow whirled across the frozen ground ahead of a biting wind. His father's old buffalo greatcoat hung long and loose on his gaunt frame. His hands were paws in fur-backed leather mittens. A muskrat cap with earmuffs sat low on his head. His deep-set eyes searched the landscape, his long nose sniffed the scent of coming snow, his shaggy-furred shoulders were stooped. He looked a winter-poor bear come wandering from his den. He crossed the road to the south and took shelter for a moment in the lee of the log cabin.

The Linden land was fertile for the most part. Its three hundred acres divided themselves naturally into woods, pastures, and fields suitable for varying crops. A country road bisected the farm. The house sat back from it to the north, the barns to the south. The richest soil lay south and west of the barns. Here the money crops were grown, the beans, the wheat, the potatoes. The land dipped to a willow-bordered stream that ran from east to west, and the cow pasture began beyond the stream. The hill that lifted again, still to the south, was stony and was given over to the sheep. The high extreme southeastern corner of the land consisted of forty acres of wood-lot, from which trees were cut selectively for fuel and for building. The woods ended suddenly and blackly with a hemlock- rimmed bog, from which springs seeped down to join the brook, and so dangerous that a cow breaking loose and wandering there would perish within a few minutes if unnoticed and unrescued. A crystal lake, believed to be bottomless, fed the stream from the east, and the western border became marsh, infested with small rattlers.