e dry
buckskin, and over his brown, thin face his hair fell to his shoulders,
snow-white. His hands were thin, even his nose was thin with the
thinness of age. But his eyes were still like dark garnets, and down
through the greater part of a century their vision had come undimmed.

They roved over the valley now. At Meshaba's back, a mile on the other
side of the ridge, was the old trapper's cabin, where he lived alone.
The winter had been long and cold, and in his gladness at the coming of
spring Meshaba had come up the ridge to bask in the sun and look out
over the changing world. For an hour his eyes had travelled up and down
the valley like the eyes of an old and wary hawk. The dark spruce and
cedar forest edged in the far side of the valley; between that and the
ridge rolled the meadowy plain--still covered with melting snow in
places, and in others bare and glowing, a dull green in the sunlight.
From where he sat Meshaba could also see a rocky scarp of the ridge
that projected out into the plain a hundred yards away. But this did
not interest him, except that if it had not been in his line of vision
he could have seen a mile farther down the valley.

In that hour of Sphinx-like watching, while the smoke curled slowly up
from his black pipe, Meshaba had seen life. Half a mile from where he
was sitting a band of caribou had come out of the timber and wandered
into a less distant patch of low bush. They had not thrilled his old
blood with the desire to kill, for there was already a fresh carcass
hung up at the back of his cabin. Still farther away he had seen a
hornless moose, so grotesque in its spring ugliness that the
parchment-like skin of his face had cracked for half an instant in a
smile, and out of him had come a low and appreciative grunt; for
Meshaba, in spite of his age, still had a sense of humour left. Once he
had seen a wolf, and twice a fox, and now his eyes were on an eagle
high over his head. Meshaba would not have shot that eagle, for year
after year it had come down through time with him, and it was always
there soaring in the sun when spring came. So Meshaba grunted as he
watched it, and was glad that Upisk had not died during the winter.

"Kata y ati sisew," he whispered to himself, a glow of superstition in
his fiery eyes. "We have lived long together, and it is fated that we
die together, Oh Upisk. The spring has come for us many times, and soon
the black winter will swallow us up for ever."