See Amid the Winter “I tell you what, my dear,” said my aunt,
one morning in the Christmas season when I left school: “as this
knotty point is still unsettled, and as we must not make a
mistake in our decision if we can help it, I think we had better
take a little breathing-time. In the meanwhile, you must try to
look at it from a new point of view, and not as a schoolboy.” It
was in the meadows along the little lake at Cottonwood Springs,
a hundred yards or so up from the dam, that I saw the fox, red-
brown against the December snow. For decades after the Black
Hills were named a “national forest reserve” in 1897, the
government would exchange small pieces of land with ranchers
along the edges, trading pastures for tree-grown lots. The
result was a more natural, serrated line of dark spruce and
ponderosa pine on the forest’s border, but the reduction of open
spaces within the protected woods—the loss of meadows like the
one where I saw the fox this winter—also limited some of the
land’s support for small wild