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to look for gold, and he’d been in the Forty Mile country for twenty-one years now. He was on the town council and was a member of the school board in Eagle.
    The two of us having left home early gave us something in common. He didn’t stop calling me madam, but I could tell he felt kind of fatherly towards me. All the rest of that day, seeing how badly off I was, he helped me down and let me walk a little even when we weren’t going down a steep hill. It meant that the whole pack train had to slow up and I really appreciated it.
    It was getting towards dark and I was thinking that we were never going to reach Steel Creek, when we came to the foot of the steepest trail we’d come across so far. The brush around it was so thick and high that it formed a tunnel. Even without packs it would have been a tough trail for the animals to climb. Now since it was the end of the day and they were tired, they balked at it and I didn’t blame them.
    They weren’t the best animals to begin with—I’d seen finer horses pulling vegetable wagons—and they were overloaded. Besides that, most of the loads weren’t packed on them right and half of them had sores full of pus and blood where the loads were rubbing against them. One of the mules whose back was the worst of all kept trying to knock his pack off against every tree he passed. I mentioned it to Mr. Strong, but he said they’d be all right.
    Now he kept smacking the lead animals on the rump with his coiled whip and yelling at them, but it didn’t doany good. They were played out. I’d thought he was mad when he’d whipped Blossom earlier in the morning, but this time he went into a rage.
    Dismounting, he searched around in the brush until he came up with a length of dead limb as thick as a two-by-four. Then helling and damning to beat the band, he clubbed the first few animals all over their bodies. I thought he’d gone crazy and was going to kill them, but they moved. One after the other they disappeared up into the tunnel of brush, dirt and rocks coming down behind them. When Mr. Strong reached me, he threw the limb aside and took Blossom’s reins.
    Leading Blossom to his own horse, he mounted up. “This will be a tough climb, madam. You’re going to have to hold on.”
    Before I could say anything, he’d spurred his horse forward, jerking Blossom’s reins, and the next thing I knew I was charging up through the tunnel after him. It was so steep I couldn’t see how we were going to make it to the top. I could barely see ahead with all the dust that had been raised, and a couple of times I was almost blinded by branches. It was a full five minutes before we broke out of it. When we did the horses and mules were dripping sweat onto the ground and breathing so hard they sounded like bellows. My backside was raw and I was all for just dropping off Blossom and giving up then and there, but when I asked Mr. Strong if I could get off, he shook his head, too winded to talk. It took him a minute before he could say, “Walk your horse over there.” He pointed to a spot about a hundred yards away and I nudged Blossom over to it.
    I didn’t know what to expect, but what I saw made me forget every ache and pain I had. The sun was below the distant mountains, and the land in between was covered with a strange veil of gray. Pine and spruce loomed up from the slopes below me, and beyond there was so much land, all of it bursting with spruce and tamarack, that I felt like a speck of dust that could be swept away in a second. Winding through it for as far as I could see were the waters of the Forty Mile River. And directly below, on the other side of the river, looking almost unreal, were twenty acres of tilled farmland. A big red barn was set to one side of them, and near that was a log building with bright patches of flowers all around it. Another half acre, directly behind the building, was lined with the orderly green rows of a vegetable garden.
    “Steel Creek,” Mr.