e out once in
a while to trade, and that is all. Even the Hudson Bay Company failed to
find them and farm them.

"And now the girl. I was coming up a stream--you'd call it a river in
California--uncharted--and unnamed. It was a noble valley, now shut in
by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches,
wide and long, with pasture shoulder-high in the bottoms, meadows dotted
with flowers, and with clumps of timberspruce--virgin and magnificent.
The dogs were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played
out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and
drivers from and go on with the first snow. It was late fall, but
the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be in
sub-arctic America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies,
and yet there was that everlasting spread of flowers. Some day the white
settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.

"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indian
dogs--and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them,
proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerking-frames that the
fall hunting had been good. And then I met her--Lucy. That was her name.
Sign language--that was all we could talk with, till they led me to a
big fly--you know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire
burned. It was all of moose-skins, this fly--moose-skins, smoke-cured,
hand-rubbed, and golden-brown. Under it everything was neat and orderly
as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce boughs.
There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskins--white
swan-skins--I have never seen anything like that robe. And on top of it,
sitting cross-legged, was Lucy. She was nut-brown. I have called her a
girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a
full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue.

"That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, but
deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. More
than that, they had laughter in them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human,
very human, and... shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's
eyes, a proper woman's eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more?
Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild unrest, a
wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of all-wise
and philosophical