Dick's Desertion by Marjorie Pickthall — Read

A world of small, whirling, white flakes, rushing, eddying, drifting / before a wind that continually shifted from one quarter to another; a / cold, grey light filtering through this haze of stinging snow; a / continuous, angry murmur, as the icy particles struck the tall, stiff, / prairie grasses, sometimes deepening to a roar as the wind momentarily / increased; and, in the midst of this unresting, resistless tumult, two / dark figures staggering uncertainly northward, leading between them an / almost exhausted pony, laden with the last remnants of their food.

For three days, the snow, and the wind, and the great cold had scourged / the prairies, and the storm was almost an early blizzard in its wild / fury, in the confusion of air-currents and always-falling, / never-resting white flakes, tipped with ice, and stinging like fire. / And for these three days Dick and Peter Many-Names had gone blindly on / their painful way, trusting to the Indian's sense of direction, yet not / knowing where they were going. An Indian's bump of locality is a / marvellously developed organ; but it is of little use in a blizzard. / And now the two lads were staggering forward, with no hope that they / were keeping to the right path -- one in stoic resignation, the other in / a passion of regret and despair. They were almost exhausted, and only / kept moving through fear of that snow-sleep from which there is no / awakening. Even this fear had now become dulled through cold and / weariness.