The sky had been grey and overcast all the morning, and about midday snow started to fall heavily. Soon and landscape was hidden in a snow fog. A sharp northeast wind made the cold intense, and I was forced to bury my face in my shawl, which soon becomes stiff with ice from my frozen breath and the driving snow.
For hours, we struggled slowly and painfully on, up and down mountain slopes and over a great desolate plateau. The fog had now become so dense that it was all we could do to find our way The wind has fast turning the snow fall into a blizzard, and reindeer were having very great difficulty in struggling against it, and were beginning to show signs of tiring. Now and again, they would lie down, while the dogs, whose energy never seemed to fail, would race up and down beside them with short sharp barks, as if to encourage them to go on again.
In spite of my furs, I was beginning to feel very cold, and was half buried under the snow with which the sledge had become covered. Now and then, I pinched and rubbed my face in order to make certain that it was becoming frostbitten.
The hours passed slowly by, till at last darkness feel. Still we plodded on, the reindeer making hardly any headway, while the wind moaned and screamed like a live thing and the snow whirled in wild gusts against our faces.
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As we crossed the great Storvatn Lake, seven miles longs, the windswept with such increasing fury that I dared not lift a corner of the shawl covering my face. I was beginning to wonder if this nightmare drive would go on forever when at last I felt my sledge come to a standstill.
It was too dark to see the others, and, for one horrible moment, I feared my reindeer had become united from the back of per’s pulka, and that I had been left behind. Staring anxiously into the gloom, I was thankful to see the Lapp struggling towards me through the deep snow.
I could now see that the weary reindeer were all lying down. Even the dogs were subdued for once; they were no longer barking, but huddled together and panting, with tongues lolling, but huddled together and panting, with tongues lolling out. Could it be that the deer were unable to go any further? I imagined a night out in the blizzard in a dug-out of snow, with my sledge turned up on end as a shelter, and found the prospect far from pleasing! The next moment, to my great relief, Per was bending over me and shouting in my ear to make himself heard above the storm, which every moment was becoming worse, and I caught the welcome words, ‘ Mollesjok fiellstue!’
The misery and the cold of the last eight hours were all forgotten in the joyous thought of warmth, food and shelter. Climbing with difficulty out of the sledge in my unwieldy furs, I plunged as best I could through the deep snow, sinking above my knees at every steps, up to the door of atiny log hut which I could just see in the darkness about a hundred yards away.