maintained a cheerful preference for his own way of life. It was
an excellent way if you had the constitution for it. The Pocket
Hunter had gotten to that point where he knew no bad weather, and
all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors.
I do not know just how long it takes to become saturated with the
elements so that one takes no account of them. Myself can never
get past the glow and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long
dust-heavy winds, the play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past
the keen fret of fatigue when the storm outlasts physical
endurance. But prospectors and Indians get a kind of a weather
shell that remains on the body until death.

The Pocket Hunter had seen destruction by the violence of
nature and the violence of men, and felt himself in the grip of an
All-wisdom that killed men or spared them as seemed for their good;
but of death by sickness he knew nothing except that he believed he
should never suffer it. He had been in Grape-vine Canon the year
of storms that changed the whole front of the mountain. All
day he had come down under the wing of the storm, hoping to win
past it, but finding it traveling with him until night. It kept on
after that, he supposed, a steady downpour, but could not with
certainty say, being securely deep in sleep. But the weather
instinct does not sleep. In the night the heavens behind the hill
dissolved in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed
with his dreaming, so that it moved him, still asleep, to get up
and out of the path of it. What finally woke him was the crash of
pine logs as they went down before the unbridled flood, and the
swirl of foam that lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub
while the wall of water went by. It went on against the cabin of
Bill Gerry and laid Bill stripped and broken on a sand bar at the