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‘Gray dawn was just coming when we got to the top of the pass; the silence of moonlight was gone, and our company’s talk made the dreary hillsides echo. We had plenty of dogs, so a few of us went to Borwen’s Knott—a stiff climb, where every few minutes we seemed to slip back as far as we had dragged forward. My back ached long before we got to where the sheep had been marked, and I lagged behind to rest. When I got up to the others, the dogs had marked down three sheep at no great depth—perhaps a yard or so—and the spades were clearing the snow away like mad. In a minute or two the sheep were clear, and we sent them off towards the pass-road. One of the dogs scented another close in under the crags of the Knott, and to get this out seemed like to give a lot of work. How do these sheep get buried, you say? Well, it’s sheep nature when a storm—wind, snow, rain, or the three together—gets to a certain pitch to lie down with their backs toward it. Like that they bide [remain] till the worst is over, no matter whether they are buried overhead or not. For a sheep can breathe easily through a covering of twenty feet of snow; and as its body-heat thaws a little cave, the weight above, though it may be tons, doesn’t harm it at all. The breathing-places on the snow can be picked out by a man if the sheep aren’t far under; but if they are, it takes a dog all its time to find where the beast lies. Now, as I was saying, these lost sheep at Borwen’s Knott were right in among the rocks, and pretty deep down. The shepherds, however, dug a deep trench in the drift which had plastered itself against the Knott, and after an hour’s hard work the sheep jumped up not a bit worse. At Yew-tree Ghyll a gang got down to the sheep without much trouble; one of them was so lively after passing thirty hours or more in a drift that it butted over three of the shepherds in making for the open.