Explore "The Mistress of Bonaventure" by Harold Bindloss on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It was a clear starlit night when I rode across a tract of the Assiniboian prairie, some two hundred miles east of Crane Valley. A half-moon hung in the cloudless ether, and the endless levels, lying very silent under its pale radiance, seemed to roll away into infinity. They had no boundary, for the blueness above them melted imperceptibly through neutral gradations into the earth below, which, gathering strength of tone, stretched back again to the center of the lower circle a vast sweep of silvery gray.
There was absolute stillness, not even a grass blade moved; but the air was filled with the presage of summer, and the softness of the carpet, which returned no sound beneath the horse's feet, had its significance. That sod had been bleached by wind-packed snow and bound into iron hardness by months of arctic frost. Bird and beast had left it, and the waste had lain empty under the coldness of death; but life had once more conquered, and the earth was green again. Even among the almost unlettered born upon it there are few men impervious to the influence of the prairie on such a night; and in days not long gone by the half-breed _voyageurs_ told strange stories of visions seen on it during the lonely journeys they made for the great fur-trading company.