All winter long the swamps were frozen up, and men could get
into them to cut wood. Barney went day after day and cut the wood in
a great swamp a mile behind his house. He stood from morning until
night hewing down the trees, which had gotten their lusty growth from
the graves of their own kind. Their roots were sunken deep among and
twined about the very bones of their fathers which helped make up the
rich frozen soil of the great swamp. The crusty snow was three feet
deep; the tall blackberry vines were hooped with snow, set fast at
either end like snares: it was hard work making one's way through
them. The snow was over the heads of those dried weeds which did not
blow away in the autumn, but stayed on their stalks with that
persistency of life that outlives death; but all the sturdy bushes,
which were almost trees, the swamp-pinks and the wild-roses, waxed
gigantic, lost their own outlines, and stretched out farther under
their loads of snow.
Barney hewed wood in the midst of this white tangle of trees and
bushes and vines, which were like a wild, dumb multitude of
death-things pressing ever against him, trying to crowd him away.
When he hit them as he passed, they swung back in his face with a
semblance of life. If a squirrel chattered and leaped between some
white boughs, he started as if some dead thing had come to life, for
it seemed like the voice and motion of death rather than of life.
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