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A blizzard on the prairie corresponds to a storm at sea; it never affects the traveler twice alike. Each norther seems to have a manner of attack all its own. One storm may be short, sharp, high-keyed, and malevolent,while another approaches slowly, relentlessly, wearing out the souls of its victims by its inexorable and long-continued cold and gloom. One threatens for hours before it comes, the other leaps like a tiger upon the defenseless settlement, catching the children unhoused, the men unprepared; of this character was the first blizzard Lincoln ever saw.
The day was warm and sunny. The eaves dripped musically, and the icicles dropping from the roof fell occasionally with a pleasant crash.The snow grew slushy, and the bells of wood teams jingled merrily all the forenoon, as the farmers drove to their timber-lands some miles away. The school room was uncomfortably warm at times, and the master opened the outside door. It. was the eighth of January. During the afternoon recess, as the boys were playing in their shirt-sleeves, Lincoln called Milton’s attention to a great cloud rising in the west and north. A vast, slaty-blue, seamless dome silent, portentous, with edges of silvery, frosty light.
“It’s going to storm,” said Milton. “It always does when we have a south wind and a cloud like that in the west.”
When Lincoln set out for home, the sun was still shining, but the edge of the cloud had crept, or more properly slid, across the sun’s disk, and its light was growing cold and pale. In fifteen minutes more the wind from the south ceased — there was a moment of breathless pause and then, borne on the wings of the north wind, the streaming clouds of soft, large flakes of snow drove in a level line over the homeward-bound scholars, sticking to their clothing and faces and melting rapidly. It was not yet cold enough to freeze,though the wind was colder. The growing darkness troubled Lincoln most.
By the time he reached home, the wind was a gale, the snow a vast,blinding cloud, filling the air and hiding the road. Darkness came on instantly, and the wind increased in power, as though with the momentum of the snow. Mr. Stewart came home early, yet the breasts of his horses were already sheathed in snow. Other teamsters passed, breasting the storm, and calling cheerily to their horses. One team, containing a woman and two men, neighbors living seven miles north, gave up the contest, and turned in at the gate for shelter, confident that they would be able to go on in the morning. In the barn, while rubbing the ice from the horses, the men joked and told stories in a jovial spirit, with the feeling generally that all would be well by daylight. The boys made merry also, singing songs, popping corn,playing games, in defiance of the storm.
But when they went to bed, at ten o’clock, Lincoln felt some vague premonition of a dread disturbance of Nature, far beyond any other experience in his short life. The wind howled like ten thousand tigers, and the cold grew more and more intense. The wind seemed to drive in and through the frail tenement; water and food began to freeze within ten feet of the fire.
Lincoln thought the wind at that hour had attained its utmost fury, but when he awoke in the morning, he saw how mistaken he had been. He crept to the fire, appalled by the steady, solemn, implacable clamor of the storm.It was like the roaring of all the lions of Africa, the hissing of a wilderness of serpents, the lashing of great trees. It benumbed his thinking, it appalled his heart, beyond any other force he had ever known.
The house shook and snapped, the snow beat in muffled, rhythmic pulsations against the walls, or swirled and lashed upon the roof, giving rise to strange, multitudinous sounds; now dim and far, now near and allsurrounding; producing an effect of mystery and infinite reach, as though the cabin were a helpless boat, tossing on an angry, limitless sea.
Looking out, there was nothing to be seen but the lashing of the wind and snow. When the men attempted to face it, to go to the rescue of the cattle,they found the air impenetrably filled with fine, powdery snow mixed with the dirt caught up from the plowed fields by a terrific blast moving ninety miles an hour. It was impossible to see twenty feet, except at long intervals.Lincoln could not see at all when facing the storm. When he stepped into the wind, his face was coated with ice and dirt, as by a dash of mud — a mask which blinded the eyes, and instantly froze to his cheeks. Such was the power of the wind that he could not breathe an instant unprotected. His mouth being once open, it was impossible to draw breath again without turning from the wind.
The day was spent in keeping warm and in feeding the stock at the barn,which Mr. Stewart reached by desperate dashes, during the momentary clearing of the air following some more than usually strong gust. Lincoln attempted to water the horses from the pump, but the wind blew the water out of the pail. So cold had the wind become that a dipperful, thrown into the air, fell as ice. In the house it became more and more difficult to remain cheerful, notwithstanding the family had fuel and food in abundance.
Oh, that terrible day! Hour after hour they listened to that prodigious,appalling, ferocious uproar. All day Lincoln and Owen moved restlessly to and fro, asking each other, “Won’t it ever stop?” To them the storm now seemed too vast, too ungovernable, ever again to be spoken to a calm, even by God Himself. It seemed to Lincoln that no power whatever could control such fury; his imagination was unable to conceive of a force greater than this war of wind or snow.
On the third day the family rose with weariness, and looked into each other’s faces with a sort of horrified surprise. Not even the invincible heart of Duncan Stewart, nor the cheery good nature of his wife, could keep a gloomy silence from settling down upon the house. Conversation was scanty; nobody laughed that day, but all listened anxiously to the invisible tearing at the shingles, beating against the door, and shrieking around the eaves. The frost upon the windows, nearly half an inch thick in the morning, kept thickening into ice, and the light was dim at midday. The fire melted the snow on the windowpanes and upon the door, while around the keyhole and along every crack, frost formed. The men’s faces began to wear a grim, set look, and the women sat with awed faces and downcast eyes full of unshed tears, their sympathies going out to the poor travelers, lost and freezing.
The men got to the poor dumb animals that day to feed them; to water them was impossible. Mr. Stewart went down through the roof of the shed,the door being completely sealed so up with solid banks of snow and dirt. One of the guests had a wife and two children left alone in a small cottage six miles farther on, and physical force was necessary to keep him from setting out in face of the deadly tempest. To him the nights seemed weeks,and the days interminable, as they did to the rest, but it would have been death to venture out.
That night, so disturbed had all become, they lay awake listening, waiting,hoping for a change. About midnight Lincoln noticed that the roar was no longer so steady, so relentless, and so high-keyed as before. It began to lull at times, and though it came back to the attack with all its former ferocity, still there was a perceptible weakening. Its fury was becoming spasmodic. One of the men shouted down to Mr. Stewart, “The storm is over,” and when the host called back a ringing word of cheer, Lincoln sank into deep sleep in sheer relief.
Oh, the joy with which the children melted the ice on the windowpanes,and peered out on the familiar landscape, dazzling, peaceful, under the brilliant sun and wide blue sky. Lincoln looked out over the wide plain, ridged with vast drifts; on the far blue line of timber, on the near-by cottages sending up cheerful columns of smoke (as if to tell him the neighbors were alive), and his heart seemed to fill his throat. But the wind was with him still, for so long and continuous had its voice sounded in his ears, that even in the perfect calm his imagination supplied its loss with fainter, fancied roarings.
Out in the barn the horses and cattle, hungry and cold, kicked and bellowed in pain, and when the men dug them out, they ran and raced like mad creatures, to start the blood circulating in their numbed and stiffened limbs. Mr. Stewart was forced to tunnel to the barn door, cutting through the hard snow as if it were clay. The drifts were solid, and the dirt mixed with the snow was disposed on the surface in beautiful wavelets, like the sands at the bottom of a lake. The drifts would bear a horse. The guests were able to go home by noon, climbing above the fences, and rattling across the plowed ground.
And then in the days which followed, came grim tales of suffering and heroism. Tales of the finding of stage-coaches with the driver frozen on his seat and all his passengers within; tales of travelers striving to reach homes and families. Cattle had starved and frozen in their stalls, and sheep lay buried in heaps beside the fences where they had clustered together to keep warm. These days gave Lincoln a new conception of the prairies. It taught him that however bright and beautiful they might be in summer under skies of June, they could be terrible when the Norther was abroad in his wrath.They seemed now as pitiless and destructive as the polar ocean. It seemed as if nothing could live there unhoused. All was at the mercy of that power,the north wind, whom only the Lord Sun could tame.
( Hamlin Garland )
Hamlin Garland (1860-1940) was born in Wisconsin. His father was a farmer-pioneer, who, always eager to be upon the border line of agricultural development, moved from Wisconsin to Minnesota, from Minnesota to Iowa, and from Iowa to Dakota. The hope of cheaper acres, better soil, and bigger crops led him on.
When Hamlin Garland turned his attention to literature he was keen enough to see the literary value of his early experiences. He resolved to interpret truthfully the life of the western farmer and its great hardships and limitations, no less than its hopes, joys, and achievements. In doing this, through a succession of short stories and novels, he won fame and success. In A Son of the Middle Border, an autobiography, he has written an intensely interesting and valuable record of typical experiences in the development of the Middle West. “The Great Blizzard” is taken from Boy Life on the Prairie. The boy Lincoln was a brother of Hamlin Garland.
malevolent : destructive
inexorable : merciless
portentous : foretelling of a calamity
appalled : disgusted by something or someone
multitudinous : many different kinds of
prodigious : terrible
invincible : courageous, unable to be conquered
relentless : never stopping
spasmodic : dying out, then coming back to life
A) Answer the following questions.
1) How are blizzards different from other violent storms?
2) How can blizzards be dangerous when they come without warning?
3) How did this blizzard begin?
4) Why did it become dark early?
5) How did the boy feel about the storm?
6) How did the other members of the household feel?
7) What was the velocity of the wind?
8) How long did the blizzard last?
9) What is some evidence of how violent the storm was?
10) What did the storm teach the boy about the prairie?
B) What’s the word? Using the clues, write the correct words from the story.
1) a very strong wind - g _ _
2) protection from weather - s _ _ _ _ _
3) uncountable, never stopping - i _ _ _ _ _ _
4) small houses - c _ _ _ _ _ _
5) causing a lot of damage - d _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
C) Summary — Write a short summary of this story.