The story uses the metaphor of harsh winter storms to represent the impartiality of fate. The characters cannot avoid or circumvent the effects of the storms, a fact the narrator observes during the apogee of one storm:
“[...] drift on drift of snow piled high around the hut—a hopeless, uncharted, trackless sea of white lying below the rocky shores to which the castaways still clung.
The unpredictable danger posed by the sudden snow strengthens the idea that external circumstances, rather than inherent character traits, dictate a person's actions in "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." The “outcasts” here are described as the survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to the “rocky shores” of survival against all odds. The snow has turned the landscape of the mountains into a “trackless sea of white,” which covers and crushes all in its path. The sea, in American Realist literature, is often used as a metaphor for powerful and impartial forces. The narrator, in passages like this, doubles down on the implications of this metaphor, combining it with that of the snowstorm. Like sailors lost at sea, the characters in the story are “hopeless” against the waves and swells of the impartial hand of fate.
Ironically, the effect of the snow is to subvert the “merciful” judgement placed on Harte's characters by the town. The “secret committee” of Poker Flat banished the group to avoid killing them for their “crimes." The snowfall in the pass is simply bad luck, but it has the same effect as the other death sentences passed by the residents of Poker Flat. This result displays for the reader that fate makes the lives of all Harte's characters unpredictable, and that individual choices are often subsumed by larger natural forces.
