Once she said, “Isn’t it dangerous?” But the way she looked at him and the way she spoke made him feel that really she meant, “Isn’t it dangerous for you?” When he thought that maybe she meant it that way he felt funny—and not from the whiskeys he’d had.

He didn’t really even get her name straight until well along in the evening, and when he was dancing with her sister he felt himself thinking of her just as “the girl.”

When it was time to go, she was wearing a hat that covered up the dark hair, but he could see the good blue eyes and the dark-tanned face. Then he wanted to say something free and easy, like “So long, sister, see you in church!” But all he found himself saying was just, “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye” was all she said, too.

Rick wanted to call something after her as she went away, but he felt funny again, and couldn’t remember anything that was important enough to say, and all he could think of was “blue eyes in a dark-tanned face” as if it were a song.

11

Before the melting ice disclosed the Pass, there was the River. Once it flowed into the ocean through a canyon. But the land sank and the sea-water flooded in through the hills, drowning that canyon so that it became a strait leading to a land-locked bay. But still the River, drawing its strength from the mountains, running in a hundred loops and reaches, flowed southward through the Valley.

This was the nature of the River during the long dry season. It was lean and dark, and idled from sand-bar to sand-bar. The banks were high and thickly grown with willows; farther back, lay long reaches of marsh with massed growth of tall reeds: next came grassland, and then park-like stretches where grass grew beneath great oak trees. Elk with branching antlers browsed the willows; huge bears dug among the roots for food. And after several ages came a dark-skinned people, building poor huts, snaring fish, and gathering seeds.

But in the wet season the River changed its nature. The clouds hung heavy upon the mountains; the rain fell; and—with a gentle swish in the night—the River stirred into life. Where sand-bars had shown yesterday, brown water flowed today. A tree, uprooted somewhere far in the foothills, slid noiselessly by. The bears moved off toward the higher lands, where acorns now lay beneath the oaks. The long-legged elk, good waders and swimmers, were in less hurry, but they too began to move. The dark-skinned people looked out and saw muddy water knee-deep among the willows; then they followed bear and elk. Waist-deep they floundered and splashed through creek and swale and slough toward the oak groves.