It was well that they had collected a good store of pine nuts and wild seeds in the autumn after they left the canyon; the snow was thigh deep this winter. It was bitter cold; men and birds would freeze; the firewood on the ground was covered. But deep snow soon exhausted hunted deer and antelope, and there would be no lack of drinking water here on the plateau. The laden trees brought back to him that long past day when his father found the Navaho woman lost in the snow and took her to wife. He remembered other Navaho; those he had fought, those whose horses he had carried off, those who had despoiled him on a trading trip to the Hopi. There had been many a trip eastward to the Hopi villages, where the Navaho, quondam enemies, came to trade too. Presents exchanged, friendships renewed in night-long talks, buckskins and horn ladles traded for blankets, he would turn his packed horses back for the fortnight’s journey across the arid wastes toward his canyon home. There he would wait the coming of the Walapai, his blood brothers, from the west. Or, if they did not come, he would carry the Hopi woven stuffs to trade in their country. Once he had even penetrated beyond their range to the Mohave in the low land of the Colorado River, where, astounded at his effrontery, they had permitted him to stay and peaceably trade.