Jim Davis | Page 9

how strange it would be to be shut in by walls of snow, with only one little hole for air, seeing nothing but the white all round us, having no window to look through. We thought that it would be wonderful to have a snow-house, especially if snow fell after the roof had been covered in, for then no one could know if the dweller were at home. One would lie very still, wrapped up in buffalo robes, while all the time the other Indians would be prowling about in their war-paint, looking for you. Or perhaps the Spaniards would be after you with their bloodhounds, and you would get down under the snow in the forest somewhere, and the snow would fall and fall, covering your tracks, till nothing could be seen but a little tiny hole, melted by your breath, through which you got fresh air. Then you would hear the horses and the armour and the baying of the hounds; but they would never find you, though their horses' hoofs might almost sink through the snow to your body.
We went down to the orchard, Hugh and I, determined to build a snow-house if the drifts were deep enough. We were not going to plunge into a drift, and make a sort of chamber by wrestling our bodies about, as the Indians do. We had planned to dig a square chamber in the biggest drift we could find, and then to roof it over with an old tarpaulin stretched upon sticks. We were going to cover the tarpaulin with snow, in the Indian fashion, and we had planned to make a little narrow passage, like a fox's earth, as the only doorway to the chamber.
It was a bright, frosty morning: the sun shone, the world sparkled, the sky was of a dazzling blue, the snow gleamed everywhere. Hoolie, the dog, was wild with excitement. He ran from drift to drift, snapping up mouthfuls of snow, and burrowing down sideways till he was half buried.
There was a flower garden at one end of the orchard, and in the middle of the garden there was a summer-house. The house was a large, airy single room (overlooking the stream), with a space beneath it, half-cave, half-cellar, open to the light, where Joe Barnicoat kept his gardening tools, with other odds-and-ends, such as bast, peasticks, sieves, shears, and traps for birds and vermin. Hugh and I went directly to this lower chamber to get a shovel for our work.
We stood at the entrance for a moment to watch Hoolie playing in the snow; and as we watched, something caught my eye and made me look up sharply.
Up above us, on the side of the combe beyond the lane, among a waste of gorse, in full view of the house (and of the orchard where we were), there was a mound or barrow, the burial-place of an ancient British king. It was a beautifully-rounded hill, some twenty-five feet high. A year or two before I went there it had been opened by the vicar, who found inside it a narrow stone passage, leading to an inner chamber, walled with unmortared stone. In the central chamber there were broken pots, a few bronze spear-heads, very green and brittle, and a mass of burnt bones. The doctor said that they were the bones of horses. On the top of all this litter, with his head between his knees, there sat a huge skeleton. The vicar said that when alive the man must have been fully six feet six inches tall, and large in proportion, for the bones were thick and heavy. He had evidently been a king: he wore a soft gold circlet round his head, and three golden bangles on his arms. He had been killed in battle. In the side of his skull just above the circle of gold, there was a great wound, with a flint axe-blade firmly wedged in the bone. The vicar had often told me about this skeleton. I remember to this day the shock of horror which came upon me when I heard of this great dead king, sitting in the dark among his broken goods, staring out over the valley. The country people always said that the hill was a fairy hill. They believed that the pixies went to dance there whenever the moon was full. I never saw the pixies myself, but somehow I always felt that the hill was uncanny. I never passed it at night if I could avoid it.
Now, when I looked up, as I stood with Hugh watching the dog, I saw something flash upon the top of the barrow. In that bright sun, with all the snow about, many things were sparkling; but this thing gleamed like lightning, suddenly, and then