One afternoon, with the sky full of white and black rolling clouds and a cold wind sweeping through the cedars, she halted to rest and escape the chilling gale for a while.  In a sunny place, under the lee of a gravel bank, she sought refuge.  It was warm here because of the reflected sunlight and the absence of wind.  The sand at the bottom of the bank held a heat that felt good to her cold hands.  All about her and over her swept the keen wind, rustling the sage, seeping the sand, swishing the cedars, but she was out of it, protected and insulated.  The sky above showed blue between the threatening clouds.  There were no birds or living creatures in sight.  Certainly the place had little of color or beauty or grace, nor could she see beyond a few rods.  Lying there, without any particular reason that she was conscious of, she suddenly felt shot through and through with exhilaration.

Another day, the warmest of the spring so far, she rode a Navajo mustang she had recently bought from a passing trader; and at the farthest end of her section, in rough wooded and ridged ground she had not explored, she found a canyon with red walls and pine trees and gleaming streamlet and glades of grass and jumbles of rock.  It was a miniature canyon, to be sure, only a quarter of a mile long, and as deep as the height of a lofty pine, and so narrow that it seemed only the width of a lane, but it had all the features of Oak Creek Canyon, and so sufficed for the exultant joy of possession.  She explored it.  The willow brakes and oak thickets harbored rabbits and birds.  She saw the white flags of deer running away down the open.  Up at the head where the canyon boxed she flushed a flock of wild turkeys.  They ran like ostriches and flew like great brown chickens.  In a cavern Carley found the den of a bear, and in another place the bleached bones of a steer.

She lingered here in the shaded depths with a feeling as if she were indeed lost to the world.  These big brown and seamy-barked pines with their spreading gnarled arms and webs of green needles belonged to her, as also the tiny brook, the blue bells smiling out of the ferns, the single stalk of mescal on a rocky ledge.

Never had sun and earth, tree and rock, seemed a part of her being until then.  She would become a sun-worshiper and a lover of the earth.  That canyon had opened there to sky and light for millions of years; and doubtless it had harbored sheep herders, Indians, cliff dwellers, barbarians.  She was a woman with white skin and a cultivated mind, but the affinity for them existed in her.  She felt it, and that an understanding of it would be good for body and soul.

Another day she found a little grove of jack pines growing on a flat mesa-like bluff, the highest point on her land.  The trees were small and close together, mingling their green needles overhead and their discarded brown ones on the ground.  From here Carley could see afar to all points of the compass—­the slow green descent to the south and the climb to the black-timbered distance; the ridged and canyoned country to the west, red vents choked with green and rimmed with gray; to the north the grand upflung mountain kingdom crowned with snow; and to the east the vastness of illimitable space, the openness and wildness, the chased and beaten mosaic of colored sands and rocks.