The game - courting avalanches, pushing into the highest, untracked reaches of snowbound mountains - has of late turned particularly deadly.

The hunt has now extended to include United States marines, and across snowbound mountain passes into Pakistan, where General Musharraf has deployed several thousand Pakistani troops to close off the passes and conduct village-to-village searches.

Unfazed by treacherous driving in snowbound mountains, the Bosnians are rattled by the no-smoking signs they find at every turn.

In recent years, the Taliban has begun major pushes for territory soon after the spring thaw opens the roads of snowbound mountain passes.

Mr. Zadran ordered aides to use a satellite telephone to summon new supplies of ammunition from stockpiles 70 miles south across snowbound mountains at Khost, another contested city on the Pakistan border.

Freighters would be used in varying climatic and geographical conditions, such as the snowbound mountains in Kashmir, the southern Punjabi deserts and East Pakistan's tropical forests.

Becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains, with food increasingly scarce, a small group calling themselves "The Forlorn Hope" turned to cannibalism.

This route put emigrants at risk of becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California as the Donner party had done ten years before.

But no one can argue with the hard blow of the last scene, even if no one will believe it really happens on a snowbound mountain.

British troops serving with the United Nations escorted a convoy today across the snowbound mountains of central Bosnia to this isolated stronghold of the Bosnian Government.