A soft Chinook wind blew from the Rockies, and at the edge of the timber belt the slanted sunbeams were faintly warm. In the shadow behind the spruce wood, the snow was dry, but spears of grass pierced the thin covering. Farther out, where a slope fronted south, the snow was gone and the grass was thick and gray. Bare larches, poplars and spruce clumps dotted the rolling ground, but the trees were thin and in the openings one saw the blue horizon.
Sometimes the branches cracked and the needles rattled in the wind, but for the most part all was quiet, and the landscape was austerely desolate. The farms and cattle ranches were farther south. Settlers pushed North for the valleys behind the timber belt, and as yet the broken park country had not known the plow.
By and by, however, a gray an
