“Are you glad you’re here?” he asked suddenly.

“I would pinch you for such a silly question if it weren’t that I would probably upset the canoe,” Doris laughed.  “Glad?”

“There must be quite a streak of pure barbarian in me,” she said after a while.  “I love the smell of the earth and the sea and the woods.  Even when I could see, I never cared a lot for town.  It would be all right for awhile, then I would revolt against the noise, the dirt and smoke, the miles and miles of houses rubbing shoulders against each other, and all the thousands of people scuttling back and forth, like—­well, it seems sometimes almost as aimless as the scurrying of ants when you step on their hill.  Of course it isn’t.  But I used to feel that way.  When I was in my second year at Berkeley I had a brain storm like that.  I took the train north and turned up at home—­we had a camp running on Thurlow Island then.  Daddy read the riot act and sent me back on the next steamer.  It was funny—­just an irresistible impulse to get back to my own country, among my own people.  I often wonder if it isn’t some such instinct that keeps sailors at sea, no matter what the sea does to them.  I have sat on that ridge”—­she pointed unerringly to the first summit above Hollister’s timber, straight back and high above the rim of the great cliff south of the Big Bend—­“and felt as if I had drunk a lot of wine; just to be away up in that clear still air, with not a living soul near and the mountains standing all around like the pyramids.”

“Do you know that you have a wonderful sense of direction, Doris?” Hollister said.  “You pointed to the highest part of that ridge as straight as if you could see it.”

“I do see it,” she smiled, “I mean I know where I am, and I have in my mind a very clear picture of my surroundings always, so long as I am on familiar ground.”

Hollister knew this to be so, in a certain measure, on a small scale.  In a room she knew Doris moved as surely and rapidly as he did himself.  He had dreaded a little lest she should find herself feeling lost and helpless in this immensity of forest and hills which sometimes made even him feel a peculiar sense of insignificance.  It was a relief to know that she turned to this wilderness which must be their home with the eagerness of a child throwing itself into its mother’s arms.  He perceived that she had indeed a clear image of the Toba in her mind.  She was to give further proof of this before long.

They turned the top of the Big Bend.  Here the river doubled on itself for nearly a mile and crossed from the north wall of the valley to the south.  Where the channel straightened away from this loop Hollister had built his house on a little flat running back from the right-hand bank.  A little less than half a mile below, Bland’s cabin faced the river just where the curve of the S began.  They came abreast of that now.  What air currents moved along the valley floor shifted in from the sea.  It wafted the smoke from Bland’s stovepipe gently down on the river’s shining face.