In two hours we come to a gully running so"-- she indicated an imaginary direction--"which we go down till it joins another stream so, and right there we'll find old 'No Creek's' cabin, so! Won't they be surprised to see us! I think we're very cunning to beat them in, don't you ?" She laughed a glad little bubbling laugh, and he cried: "Oh, girl! How wonderful you are!" "It's getting very dark and fierce," she chided, "and all the housework must be done." So he built a fire, then fetched a bucket of water from a rill that trickled down among the rocks near by.

He made as if to prepare their meal, but she would have none of it.
"Bigs should never cook," she declared.

"That work belongs to littles," then forced him to vacate her domain and turn himself to the manlier duties of chopping wood and boughs.
First, however, she showed him how to place two green foot-logs upon which the teapot and the frying-pan would sit without upsetting, and how long she wished the sticks of cooking-wood.

Then she banished him, as it were, and he built a wickiup of spruce tops, under the shelter of which he piled thick, fragrant billows of "Yukon feathers." Once while he was busy at his task he paused to revel in the colors that lay against hill and valley, and to drink in the splendid isolation of it all.

Below lay the bed of Black Bear Creek, silent and sombre in the creeping twilight; beyond, away beyond, across the westward brim of the Yukon basin, the peaks were blue and ivory and gold in the last rays of the sun; while the open slopes behind and all about wore a carpet of fragrant short-lived flowers, nodding as if towards sleep, and over all was the hush of the lonely hills.