r and pork and coffee in consideration of the ledges they are
about to find; but none of these proved so much worth while as the
Pocket Hunter. He wanted nothing of you and 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 mouth of the Grape-vine, seven
miles away. There, when the sun was up and the wrath of the rain spent,
the Pocket Hunter found and buried him; but he never laid his own escape
at any door but the unintelligible favor of the Powers. The journeyings
of the Pocket Hunter led him often into that mysterious country beyond
Hot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like, under the
crust of the earth. Whatever agency is at work