Turning her deer, for a time she drove along the crest of the ridge.
“I shouldn’t wonder,” she said to herself, “if he’s already taken up quarters in the old miner’s cabin down there in the willows on the bank of the Little Soquina River. Yes,” she added, “there’s the smoke of his fire.
“To think,” she stormed, enraged at the cool complacency of the thing, “to think that any man could be so mean. He has thousands of deer, and a broad, rich range. He’s afraid the range may be scant in the spring and his deer become poor for the spring shipping market, so he saves it by driving his herd over here for a month or two, that it may eat all the moss we have and leave us to make a perilous or even fatal drive to distant pastures. That, or to see our deer starve before our very eyes. It’s unfair! It’s brutally inhuman!
“And yet,” she sighed a moment later, “I suppose the men up here are not all to blame. Seems like there is something about the cold and darkness, the terrible lonesomeness of it all, that makes men like wolves that prowl in the scrub forests—fierce, bloodthirsty and savage. But that will do for sentiment. Scarberry must not have his way. He must not feed down our pasture if there is a way to prevent it. And I think there is! I’m almost sure. I must talk to Patsy about it. It would mean something rather hard for her, but she’s a brave little soul, God bless her!”
Then she spoke to her reindeer and went racing away down the slope toward the camp.
It was a strange looking camp that awaited Marian’s coming. Two dome shaped affairs of canvas were all but hidden in a clump of willows, surrounded by deer sleds and a small canvas tent for supplies—surely a strange camp for Alaskan reindeer herders.
But how comfortable were those dome shaped igloos! Marian had learned to make them during that eventful journey with the reindeer Chukches in Siberia.
Winter skins of reindeer are cheap, very cheap in Alaska. Being light, portable and warm, Marian had used many of them in the construction of this winter camp. Her heart warmed with the prospect of perfect comfort, and drawing the harness from her reindeer, she turned it loose to graze. Then she parted the flap to the igloo which she and Patsy shared.
Something of the suppressed excitement which came to her from the discovery of the rival herd must still have shown in her face, for as Patsy turned from her work of preparing a meal to look at Marian she noticed the look on her face and exclaimed:
“Oh! Did you see it, too?”