A kildee timidly chirped good-night; the
full, rich throat of a robin proclaimed good-morrow. From an island on
the breast of the Yukon a colony of wild fowl voiced its interminable
wrongs, while a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of
river.
In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark canoes
were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-barbed arrows,
buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven traps bespoke the fact
that in the muddy current of the river the salmon-run was on. In the
background, from the tangle of skin tents and drying frames, rose the
voices of the fisher folk. Bucks skylarked with bucks or flirted with
the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of
having fulfilled the end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as
they braided rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet
their naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the
tawny wolf-dogs.
To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it, stood a
second camp of two tents. But it was a white man's camp.
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