The Landing's in the Wet Belt. It rains there, it pours there, the sky falls down. Sometimes the Lake (it's on the Shushwap, you know, close to the head of it) rises up in dancing water-spouts. It was once a home and haunt of bears (and is again by now likely), but when Pete stepped ashore from the hay-laden lake wagon called the s.s. _Kamloops_, it wouldn't have been easy to find a bear or a caribou within earshot. The Street, the one Street, was full of men. There were English, French, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, Finns and Letts, mixed with autochthonous Americans with long greasy hair (Siwashes who lived on salmon) and other Americans of all sorts. It was a sink, a pool, a whirlpool, it sucked men up from down country: it drew them from the mountains. To go East you had to pass it: going West you couldn't avoid it. Men worked there and drank there and gambled there. There were Chinamen about who played the universal Fan-tan. There were Faro tables: Keno went there: stud-horse poker had its haunts and votaries. The street was a mud channel: men drank and lay in it. By the Lake they lay in piles, and more especially the Swedes did. They are rousing drinkers "and no fatal error." There was night there, of course, for the sun couldn't and wouldn't stay to save them oil, but as to peace or quietness, the peaceful quiet of a human night, there was no such thing. Sunday was rowdier than other days, if any day could be rowdier. If a man wanted work he could get it. Devil doubt it, work was to be had at fine prices. Bosses employed men to come and pretend even for two and a half a day. They dragged men in and said, "Take my dollars, sonny, and move some of this stuff." Men worked and took the dollars and gave them to the stores and gamblers. It seemed impossible that there could ever be a lack of work. You could get work on the grade, tilikum; you could have a little contract for yourself, my son. You could drive a team if you could handle horses and mules over a toat road that would make an ordinary driver weep: why, there were all kinds of work, with axe and saw and pick and shovel, and bar and drill and wedge and hammer, and maul and all sorts of other tools. It was a concert truly, a devil's dance of work, and of hurry and scurry and worry. Why, tilikum?