You feel more and
more tired. All at once, you find that the wind which was at your side a
while ago, as you kept beating into it on your course toward help and
shelter, is now at your back. Has the wind changed? No; it will blow for
hours from the same quarter--perhaps for days! No; you have changed
your course, and are beating off with the storm! This will never do: you
rally, and again turn your cheek to the cutting blast: but you know that
you are off your path; yet you wonder if you may not be going right--if
the wind _has_ changed; or if you have not turned to the left when you
should have gone to the right.
Loneliness, anxiety, weariness, uncertainty. An awful sense of
helplessness takes possession of you. If it were daylight, you could
pass around the deep drifts, even in this chaos; but now a drift looks
the same as the prairie grass swept bare. You plunge headlong into it,
flounder through it, creeping on hands and knees, with your face
sometimes buried in the snow, get on your feet again, and struggle on.
You know that the snow, finer than flour, is beating through your
clothing. You are chilled, and shiver. Sometimes-you stop for a while
and with your hands over your eyes stand stooped with your back to the
wind. You try to stamp your feet to warm them, but the snow, soft and
yielding, forbids this. You are so tired that you stop to rest in the
midst of a great drift--you turn your face from the driving storm and
wait.
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