Presently Gaspard Hari began telling how he had spent last winter; he began there with Michel Canol, who was now too old to do it again; he might get ill during the long period they were cut off. But they had not been bored; all one had to do was make the best of things from the start. It was not long before one found things to do, games and other ways of making the time pass.

Ulrich Kunzi listened with lowered eyes; he was following in the imagination of the party making their way down to the village by the zigzags of Gemmi.

Soon they sighted the inn, scarcely visible it was so small, just a dark speck at the foot of the great snow-field.
As they opened the door, Sam, the great shaggy-haired dog began to gambol around them.
‘Come along, my boy!’ said old Hari, ‘we’ve got no women here now; we must get our own dinner; you’d better peel the potatoes.’
And the two men, sitting on wooden stools, began making the soup.

The next morning seemed very long to Ulrich Kunzi. Old Hari smoked and spat into the fireplace, while the young man looked out of the window at the gleaming white mountain in front of the house. In the afternoon he went out and, following their route of yesterday, he looked for the hoof-marks of the mule on which the two women had ridden. When he reached the summit of the Gemmi Pass, he lay down on his stomach on the edge of the drop and gazed down at Leuk.

The village in its rock-bound depression was not yet buried in snow. The snow had got quite close, but it had been held up by the pine-woods which sheltered the space round it. The low houses, seen from above, looked like paving stones in a field.
The little Hauser girl was there now in one of those grey houses. Which one? Ulrich Kunzi was too far off to pick them out separately. He would have given anything to go down, while it was still possible.

But the sun had sunk behind the great peak of the Wildstubel and the young man went back. Old Hari was smoking. When he saw his mate return, he suggested a game of cards and they sat down on opposite sides of the table. They played for a long time, a simple game called ‘brisque’, after which they had supper and went to bed.

The following days were just like the first, cloudless and cold, without any fresh snow. Old Gaspard spent the afternoons watching eagles and the rare birds which ventured among the ice-covered heights, while Ulrich usually went to the top of the Gemmi Pass and gazed at the village. Then they played cards or dice or dominoes, winning and losing small stakes to give interest to the game.

One morning Hari, who was up first, called his companion. A dense cloud of filmy flakes was falling on and around them, noiselessly, gradually burying them under a thick heavy blanket of soft snow. The fall lasted for four days and four nights. They had to clear the door and window, dig a passage and cut steps to surmount the barrier of frozen snow, which twelve hours of frost had made harder than the granite of the moraines.