At the height of this storm, high in the mountains where all was impassable, a figure appeared: a man. Wrapped in a long enveloping cloak with a deep hood pulled well forward, bowing against the pitiless, biting wind, he moved slowly through the grey swirling gloom.

Occasionally, finding some rocky outcrop, he would stop and rest for a while in its lee, straightening up, grateful for a brief respite. Then, wrapping his cloak about himself for greater warmth, he would move off again.

All around him the wind screamed and clattered and echoed through valleys and clefts, bouncing off ringing rock faces and hissing over the snow, to sound sometimes like the clamour of a terrible battle, some-times like the mocking laughter of a thousand tormentors, sometimes like a great sigh. From time to time the man paused and turned and listened.

That he was lost, he knew. But that was all he knew. That and the knowledge that, for all his cloak and hood were thick and warm, he would surely soon die in this fearful place if he did not come across shelter and warmth soon.

Then through the tumult around him came another sound. The man paused as though his own soft footsteps might obscure it. But it came again and again. Distant and shifting, but persistent. It was a cry. A cry for help.

The hooded head cast about for the direction from which it came, but the wind mocked him and brought it to him from every angle, now near, now far. Then for an instant the wind was gone. Dropped to a low sighing moan. And the plaintive cry rode on it like a distraught messenger, revealing its true self before the wind returned to rend and scatter it. The man turned and moved forward, ignoring the many wind-born counter-feits now tempting him elsewhere again.

He soon came upon the caller, a small figure dark in the snow, held fast by the leg in a cruel, long-forgotten trap. Despite his desperate need and long pleading however, the caller cried out in terror as the hooded figure loomed out of the gloom towards him. But the man bent down and laid a calming hand on him.