The weather broke at last. One might say it smashed itself over their
heads. There came an afternoon darkness swift and sudden, a wild gale
and an icy sleet that gave place in the night to snow, so that Trafford
looked out next morning to see a maddening chaos of small white flakes,
incredibly swift, against something that was neither darkness nor light.
Even with the door but partly ajar a cruelty of cold put its claw
within, set everything that was moveable swaying and clattering, and
made Marjorie hasten shuddering to heap fresh logs upon the fire. Once
or twice Trafford went out to inspect tent and roof and store-shed,
several times wrapped to the nose he battled his way for fresh wood, and
for the rest of the blizzard they kept to the hut. It was slumberously
stuffy, but comfortingly full of flavours of tobacco and food. There
were two days of intermission and a day of gusts and icy sleet again,
turning with one extraordinary clap of thunder to a wild downpour of
dancing lumps of ice, and then a night when it seemed all Labrador,
earth and sky together, was in hysterical protest against inconceivable
wrongs.
And then the break was over; the annual freezing-up was accomplished,
winter had established itself, the snowfall moderated and ceased, and an
ice-bound world shone white and sunlit under a cloudless sky.