An isolated cabin, a sylvan haven, stood in the forest of Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. A wispy plume of woodsmoke rose from the chimney. What’s this? A bay window (an oriel!) protruded from the south wall.

A wizened gnome, Gabbro, sat at his writing desk. The cabin was his writing shed, his scriptorium, his hermitage. Hey, ‘hermitage’ is a pretty neat word, a good starting point for a crossword puzzle(or, as he phrased it, an exercise in cruciverbalism). Gabbro pulled a sheet of graph paper from his desk drawer and picked up his turkey quill pen. Although his hands were gnarled and arthritic after years of toiling in the mines, he still tidily printed the word ‘hermitage’ in a row of the little squares. What’s next? Well, there’s a word he liked immensely, ‘gnome’. Now, he had two words, crossing at the ‘m’.

Hmmm. What if he inserted ‘Colorado’ in the row above ‘hermitage’, with the first ‘o’ crossing‘ gnome’? Now there are many possibilities. Can he use the ‘CR’ combination in a vertical entry? Oh, how about that famous silver mining town, Creede? Then there’s also a vertical ‘LI’ – Roman 51, lithium, a Chinese measure of distance; well, he decided to just leave that alone for now. After the ‘LI’, there’s ‘OT’; how about those playful animals found in some mountain streams, ‘otters’? It should be easy to use ‘RA’ – radium,ranch, or whatever. The next vertical entry is ‘AG’; that could be silver, or many other words. Finally, there’s ‘DE’; there must be dozens, maybe hundreds, of words that start with those letters; let’s try ‘Denver’ for now.

Gabbro had not intended to create a crossword puzzle today, yet he was now fully absorbed. He examined his work. Could he do something with the ‘D’ of ‘Creede’ and the ‘R’ of ‘otters’? Oh, of course, ‘deer’. In a moment of inspiration, he chose ‘Artemis’, the goddess of the hunt, to link the last ‘E’ of ‘Creede’ and the ‘S’ of ‘otters’.

The stocky scrivener sat back in his chair. He realized that he had become a bit chilled, despite his heavy dungarees, woolen jerkin, and deerskin moccasins. He arose and fed another spruce branch into the fire. He knew that a human might take time for a ‘coffee break’, but he chose to have a hot chicory root tisane and an acorn-and-wild berry muffin. Hey, ‘chicory’ is another interesting word, and it could provide a vertical link between the ‘H’ of ‘hermitage’ and the ‘R’ of ‘Artemis’. That’s a lot better than his first idea of putting ‘cholera’ in that space.

The little cabin was now downright cold! A strong wind rattled the windows and shook the door. Sunlight no longer streamed through the bay window. [Hey, ‘bay’ could be a horizontal word using the ‘y’ of ‘chicory’!] Clearly, an April blizzard was coming.

Gabbro worried that the ink in his pewter inkwell might freeze. Well, he had plenty of food and firewood on hand. He lit his two wall-mounted hurricane lamps and set out beeswax candles on his desk.

Let’s see. The word ‘gnome’ is just sticking up above the rest of the puzzle, like a flag. Gabbro wanted to use that lonely ‘G’. Could he find some unusual word that was appropriate for a puzzle that was largely about Colorado? How about ‘argentine’, a seldom used word that means the color ‘silver’? Sure, that could cross the ‘G’ of ‘gnome’, but it created a new flag. Oh, here we go. The ‘T’ lines up above the ‘RA’ that he had skipped over a while ago; the word ‘Tara’, from Irish history, fits there. But he couldn’t imagine how to use the ‘I’ with the combination ‘AG’ just below. Oh, you dummkopf! Just IMAGINE!!

So now, he had the second ‘I’ of ‘imagine’ next to the ‘N’ of ‘Denver’. How about ‘Inca’, the Andean people who impressed the Spanish conquerors with their wealth in gold and silver? Next row down is ‘NV’; that’s easy – the abbreviation for the Silver State. And then he had the combination ‘EE’; he decided to use ‘eery’, an alternative spelling of ‘eerie’. That gave him the ‘A’ of ‘Inca’ two rows above the ‘Y’ of ‘eery’; the word ‘abyss’ fits nicely there. The second ‘S’ of ‘abyss’ is now hanging out on its own; he stuck an ‘A’ in front of it to form the chemical symbol for arsenic.

Can he do anything with the second ‘E’ of ‘argentine’ and the final ‘O’ of ‘Colorado’? He sang to himself, “I Need a Hero”. Nevertheless, he chose the Greek goddess Leto, the mother of Artemis and Apollo. Leto’s ‘L’ can be the second letter of‘ elk’. Add an ‘E’ horizontally after Leto’s ‘T’ and he had the chemical symbol for tellurium.

In the lower left quadrant of his puzzle, Gabbro saw a ‘C’, then a blank space, followed by an ‘E’. OK, the word ‘niche’ fits nicely there. ‘Raccoon’, that masked denizen of the forest, can stand upright upon the ‘N’. Poe’s midnight bird flies horizontally from the ‘R’. And then he could add ‘eat’, using the ‘E’ of ‘raven’ and the ‘A’ of ‘argentine’.

That looks pretty good. There are just a few nonsense or filler entries; those are easy enough to deal with.