The Mountain and the Valley by Ernest Buckler Page B

left. But Anna was with him. That made it all the nicer for being that way. You would know it was Christmas night no matter where you were and if you had no idea of the date at all.
    They were too tired to play that night. They left their things beneath the tree. They only looked at them or touched them. Outside, Christmas moonlight latticed the snow with shadows that grew out longer and longer from the dark roots of the trees. And when David went to bed, sleep covered him at once like an extra blanket drawn up.
    II
    A shuddering of the bed awakened David as sleep wore thin with the thinning of the dark. Then he heard the mourning wind. It lashed the house, hard and lost. The house seemed caught inside one great mouth. The wind tried to swallow it, then rushed moaning across the fields like something out ofits mind, gathering up the helpless snow, and returning again and again to knock itself out against the windows.
    David pulled the clothes up tight. He lay with his eyes shut, exquisitely listening. He knew the house would hold. He knew the sad, driven, crazy teeth of the wind would break when they bit into the friendly wool of the scarves and extra sweaters.
    When he went downstairs, Joseph was coming in from the barn. The wind plucked up waves of milk from the pail, like fans of cow urine. It slammed the storm door back and reached inside, sifting a fine layer of snow onto the porch floor. Joseph’s frost-creaking boots skidded and he almost lost his feet. The snow was embedded in his clothes and encrusted his eyebrows.
    “Boy, this is a snifter!” he said.
    The windowpanes were furred over with frost, except for little parabolas of drift in the sash corners. David thawed out a peephole with his breath. The trees weaved in the wind. They looked almost too tired and distracted to stand. When the wind sucked back from the house and broke in a sudden explosion before the barn, the barn disappeared. The wind spun a bluster of light snow on top of the drifts, lifting it, dropping it, baffling it. The drifts themselves, scooped out on the underside in the shape of a scythe, looked hard as bone; and here and there a patch of ice, swept smooth as a hand, shone blue and mournful.
    Joseph warned out the men to break the roads; but before the frost-whiskered oxen had gone the length of a sled runner, the vicious snow had filled in their tracks. When Chris and David went to water the cows, the wind sucked their breath from them as if it were a loose hat on their heads. The bite of the cold went right down to their lungs. They had to shout to make themselves heard. The cows shied their headsinto the biting wind and tested the water again and again with their teeth before gathering up a great frosty ball of it and rolling it down their long throats. The nails in the clapboards of the barn were drawn out and furred with the frost. The barn’s timbers creaked as if with the next gust they must surely split. When Chris and David came back to the house, the only way they could hold their breath at all was to walk back-to.
    Now there was no
night
between him and the lines of the play, David’s heart caught when he thought of them, like in falling. But around noon the teacher came to say that the concert was postponed on account of the storm (how warmingly funny the man’s pants she wore looked when he heard her say that!), and the afternoon was perfect.
    The afternoon was totally safe, because the storm kept them all in the house together. Nothing could get at them from outside. Nothing could leave. Even his father, shed of his own outdoors part, was together with them in the close house-safeness.
    Joseph drowsed on the couch in the kitchen, Ellen tore rags, and Martha knitted. Their talk made a sound like the flutter of wood in the stove or the stewing of the kettle—almost a no-sound. It was as if the cable of time had been broken and they were all magically marooned until its strands were spliced together again.
    Chris plaited