Minstrel Weather

THOUGH January has days that dress in saffron for their going, and noons
of yellow light, foretelling crocuses, the month is yet not altogether
friendly. The year is moving now toward its most unpitying season. Nights
that came on kindly may turn the meadows to iron, tear off the last faithful
leaves from oaks, drive thick clouds across the moon, to end in a violent
dawn. January holds gentle weather in one hand and blizzards in the other,
and what a blizzard can be only dwellers on prairies or among the
mountains know. Snow gone mad, its legions rushing across the land with
daggers drawn, furious, bearing no malice, but certainly no compassion,
and overwhelming all creatures abroad: bewildered flocks, birds half
frozen on their twigs, cattle unwisely left on shelterless ranges, and people
who lose the way long before animals give up. Snow hardly seems made of
fairy stars and flowers when its full terror sweeps Northern valleys or the
interminable solitudes of the plains. The gale so armed for attack owns
something of the wicked intention which Conrad says that sailors often
perceive in a storm at sea. The rider pursued by a blizzard may feel, like
the tossed mariner, that "these elemental forces are coming at him with a
purpose, with an unbridled cruelty which means to sweep the whole
precious world away by the simple and appalling act of taking his life."