In Kio's eyes,
as he sometimes looked down into the valleys, there was this thing; the
thought which perhaps he couldn't analyze, the great truth which he
couldn't understand, but felt. It made a worshipper of him--a devout
worshipper of the totem. And it occurred to David that perhaps the
spirit of God was in that totem even as much as in finger-worn rosaries
and the ivory crosses on women's breasts.
Early on the eleventh day they came to the confluence of the Pitman and
the Stikine rivers, and a little later Kio turned back on his homeward
journey, and David and Baree were alone. This aloneness fell upon them
like a thing that had a pulse and was alive. They crossed the Divide and
were in a great sunlit country of amazing beauty and grandeur, with wide
valleys between the mountains. It was July. From up and down the valley,
from the breaks between the peaks and from the little gullies cleft in
shale and rock that crept up to the snow lines, came a soft and droning
murmur. It was the music of running water. That music was always in the
air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams, gushing down from
the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds, were never still. There
were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air.
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