Explore "The Golden Snare" by James Oliver Curwood on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The night was so bright that the spruce trees cast vivid shadows on the snow. Overhead there were a billion stars in a sky as dear as an open sea, and the Great Dipper shone like a constellation of tiny suns. The world did not need a moon. At a distance of three hundred yards Philip could have seen a caribou if it had passed. He sat close to his fire, with the heat of it reflected from the blackened face of a huge rock, finishing the snare which had taken him an hour to weave. For a long time he had been conscious of the curious, hissing monotone of the Aurora, the "music of the skies," reaching out through the space of the earth with a purring sound that was at times like the purr of a cat and at others like the faint hum of a bee. Absorbed in his work he did not, for a time, hear the other sound. Not until he had finished, and was placing the golden snare in his wallet, did the one sound individualize and separate itself from the other.
He straightened himself suddenly, and listened. Then he jumped to his feet and ran through fifty feet of low scrub to the edge of the white plain.