One day, about the middle of November of that year, little Nina came into our house and threw herself into our arms, crying as if her heart would break.
"Why, Nina dear," asked my wife, "what is the matter? Is any one sick or dead?"
"Oh, no," she sobbed, "but I can't come to Sunday-school any more. Papa and Mamma and I are going away off into the mountains to-morrow, and we'll never come back here again."
We petted and soothed her, the best comfort I could give her being the thought of the great hunting adventures that were before her. So the wilderness swallowed up my brave little friend, and for eight years I had no word of her. By that time I was at another large gold camp, in a distant part of the great Yukon Valley.
I was the only minister in a region larger than Pennsylvania. My parish extended from two to five hundred miles in different directions from the camp in which I wintered. That winter I traveled with my dogs between two and three thousand miles, in preaching and exploring trips. Magazines, papers and books sent me by churches, Sunday-schools, Boys' Scouts, and women's missionary societies, I found three hundred miles from my central reading room, in miners' and trappers' cabins and in roadhouses to which I had sent them.
About the middle of the winter I was delighted to get a letter from Nina. It was written from a point about two hundred and fifty miles distant, in that great game-stocked region which lies west of the Alaska Range, of which Mt. McKinley, "The Top of the Continent," is the highest peak. It was a cheery, girlish letter—just such an one as I might have expected from Nina—grown-up. It told me of her marriage, two years before, to a young man whom I had known—one who had loved her when she was a little girl, had followed her and her parents to the western wilderness, waited patiently for her to grow up, and, now that they were married, seemed to her all that was admirable and complete in manhood. It was her one romance and was very sweet and perfect.
Nina and her husband were living in a large cabin on one of the trails that led from the Interior to the Coast. Nina called it a roadhouse, and, though low and dark, with only poles for floor, and pole-bunks for beds, it was fitted for the accommodation of a dozen travelers. Nina was queen of a wide realm. Her cabin was a hundred and twenty-five miles from that of the nearest white woman. They were two hundred miles from the nearest store. They were in the heart of the richest game region of North America—the western foot-hills of the Alaska Range. They were prospectors for gold in the summer; farmers, raising their own potatoes and vegetables and wheat for their chickens; trappers during the winter; hunters all the time; and hotel-keepers during the six months when snow and frozen streams and lakes lured travelers along the lonely trail.
There was in Nina's letter, however, no hint of loneliness; rather a joyful tone of contentment, as one of God's favored creatures; and of comradeship with the things about her—the mountains, the forests and the myriads of animals, small and great. She invited me to come and make them a long visit and have a big hunt. Her letter also spoke of the one need in her life that I could supply—Bibles, books and magazines.
Very few travelers came my way who had passed Nina's that winter, but from most of them I heard of my little chum, and always in terms of enthusiastic praise.
"I am a city man," said a young lawyer from Seattle, "and am in this wild land just long enough to make my stake and get back to the rattle of the street-cars. The 'call of the wild' has no allurement for me. There is just one thing that could make me settle down in Alaska, and that is to find such a mate as that little woman."