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The Night Born
By: Jack London
'It was in 1898 that I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there the Rockies are something more than a back-bone. It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored. There are big valleys there where the white man has never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years ... almost, for they have had some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and that is all. I was coming up a stream the dogs were packing on their backs, and were sore-footed and played out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and drivers from and go on with the first snow. And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogs--Indian dogs--and came into camp. There must have been five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerking-frames that the fall hunting had been good.
And then I met her--Lucy. That was her name. She was nut-brown. I have called her a girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nut-brown woman, an Amazon, a full-blooded, full-bodied woman, and royal ripe. And her eyes were blue. That's what took me off my feet--her eyes--blue, not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all melted into one, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in them--warm laughter, sun-warm and human, very human, and . . . shall I say feminine? And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau --the ones about the day-born gods and the night-born.'