unrest. And ever she grew fairer and yet fairer to look upon, till
some hunter, able no longer to withhold himself, took her to his lodge
to cook and toil for him and to become the mother of his children. And
with the coming of her offspring her looks left her. Her limbs dragged
and shuffled, her eyes dimmed and bleared, and only the little
children found joy against the withered cheek of the old squaw by the
fire. Her task was done. But a little while, on the first pinch of
famine or the first long trail, and she would be left, even as he had
been left, in the snow, with a little pile of wood. Such was the law.

He placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations.
It was the same everywhere, with all things. The mosquitoes vanished
with the first frost. The little tree-squirrel crawled away to die.
When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow and heavy, and could
no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big bald-face grew clumsy and
blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of
yelping huskies. He remembered how he had abandoned his own father
on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, the winter before the
missionary came with his talk-books and his box of medicines. Many a
time had Koskoosh smacked his lips over the recollection of that box,
though now his mouth refused to moisten. The "painkiller" had been
especially good. But the missionary was a bother after all, for he
brought no meat into the camp, and he ate heartily, and the hunters
grumbled. But he chilled his lungs on the divide by the Mayo, and the
dogs afterwards nosed the stones away and fought over his bones.

Koskoosh placed another stick on the fire and harked back deeper into
the past. There was the time of the Great Famine, when the old men
crouched empty-bellied to the fire, and let fall from their lips dim
traditions of the ancient day when the Yukon ran wide open for three