Her home was in San Francisco, but she spent the summer months with her husband at Karluk.
We were taken ashore in a boat and were most hospitably received in her comfortable home.
About two o 'clock in the afternoon we boarded a barge and were towed by a very small, but exceedingly noisy, launch up the Karluk River to the hatcheries, which are maintained by the Alaska Packers Association.
It was one of those soft, cloudy afternoons when the coloring is all in pearl and violet tones, and the air was sweet with rain that did not fall. The little make-believe river is very narrow, and so shallow that we were constantly in danger of running aground. We tacked from one side of the stream to the other, as the great steamers do on the Yukon.
On this little pearly voyage, a man who accompanied us told a story which clings to the memory.
"Talk about your big world," said he. "You think it 'u'd be easy to hide yourself up in this God-forgotten place, don't you? Just let me tell you a story. A man come up here a few years ago and went to work. He never did much talkin'. If you ast him a question about hisself or where he come from, he shut up like a steel trap with a rat in it. He was a nice-lookin' man, too, an' he had an education an' kind of nice clean ways with him. He built a little cabin, an' he didn't go 'out' in winter, like the rest of us. He stayed here at Karluk an' looked after things.
"Well, after one-two year a good-lookin' young woman come up here—an' jiminy-cricket! He fell in love with her like greased lightnin' an' married her in no time. I God, but that man was happy. He acted like a plumb fool over that woman. After while they had a baby—an' then he acted like two plumb fools in one. I ain't got any wife an' babies myself an' I God! it ust to make me feel queer in my throat.
"Well, one summer the superintendent's wife brought up a woman to keep house for her. She was a white, sad-faced-lookin' woman, an' when she had a little time to rest she ust to climb up on the hill an' set there alone, watchin' the sea-gulls. I've seen her set there two hours of a Sunday without movin'. Maybe she'd be settin' there now if I hadn't gone and put my foot clean in it, as usual.
"I got kind of sorry for her, an' you may shoot me dead for a fool, but one day I ast her why she didn't walk around the bay an' set a spell with the other woman.
"'I don't care much for women,' she says, never changin' countenance, but just starin' out across the bay.