Members of the Family by Owen Wister

High up the mountain amid white Winter I sat, and looked far down where still the yellow Autumn stayed, looked at Wind River shrunk to map-size, a basking valley, a drowsy country, tawny and warm, winding southeastward away to the tawny plain, and there dissolving with air and earth in one deep, hazy, golden sleep. Somewhere in that slumberous haze beyond the buttes and utmost foothills, and burrowed into the vast unfeatured level, lay my problem, Still Hunt Spring.

I had inquired much about Still Hunt Spring. Every man seemed to know of it, but no man you talked with had been to it. Description of it always came to me at second hand. Scipio I except; Scipio assured me he had once been to it. It was no easy spot to find; a man might pass it close and come back and pass it on the other side, yet never know it was at his elbow: so they said. The Indians believed a supernatural thing about it -- that it was not there every day, and few of them would talk readily about it; yet it was they who had first showed it to the white man. And because they repeated concerning a valley two hundred feet deep, a mile long, and a quarter-mile wide at its widest, this haunted legend of presence and absence, its name now possessed my mind. Like a strain of music it recurred to my thoughts each day of my November hunting in the mountains of Wind River. Still Hunt Spring; down there, somewhere in that drowsy distance, it lay. One trail alone led into it; from one end of the secret ravine to the other -- they said -- grew a single file of trees lank and tall as if they stood on stilts to see out over the top, and at the further end was a spring, small, cold, and sweet; though it welled up in the midst of sage-brush desert, there was no alkali -- they said -- in that water. Still Hunt Spring!