Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/14

6. His only neighbors were the wild folk,—the only people that he knew. For the wild creatures were still, as far as facts went, the real owners and habitants of Smoky Land. It is true that in various heavy and dusty books in legal offices it could be learned that this particular part of Idaho was public domain, but as yet few frontiersmen had come to clear away the forest and till the meadows. The place was really startlingly large—distances are always rather generous in the West—but few were the maps that named it. Those that had gone to fish in its waters and hunt its mountains thought of it always as beyond,—beyond the last outposts of civilization, beyond the end of the trails, and clear where the little rivers rose in great springs. The cattlemen had named it, and at the end of the dry summer, when forest fires ranged here and there through the high ridges on each side, the name was particularly appropriate. Because of the structure of the passes the winds were likely to fill the region with pale, blue smoke.

In reality Smoky Land lay on the great shoulders of the Rockies,—a high plateau, studded here and there by grim and lofty snow peaks. It was not a land for gentlefolk. It was a hard, grim place, a forbidding land where the sun was a curse in summer and the winds a stinging lash in winter, where great glaciers gleamed in the morning light and snow fields lay unchanging above the line where the timber became stunted