"I'm not interested in men," Miss Kent had replied frostily. "I'm a botany teacher and it helps me professionally if I spend part of the summer observing the phenomenon of nature."

"Don't kid me, Bertha. You can drop the fancy lingo, too; school's out. You want a man as much as I do."

That was true, Miss Kent admitted—in the quiet of her own mind. Never aloud; never to anyone else. Six years ago, when Bertha Kent had first started to teach, she had been optimistic about it. She wanted to marry; she wanted a family of her own—instead of wasting her lifetime in a high school classroom playing baby sitter for other people's kids. She had saved her money for all sorts of exotic summer vacations—tours, cruises, luxury hotels—but somehow something always went wrong.

To be sure, she had met men. She was pretty; she danced well; she was never prudish; she liked the out-of-doors. All positive qualities: she knew that. The fault lay always with the men. When she first met a stranger, everything was fine. Then, slowly, Miss Kent began to see his faults. Men were simply adult versions of the muscle-bound knot-heads the administration loaded into her botany classes.

Bertha Kent wanted something better, an ideal she had held in her mind since her childhood. The dream-man was real, too. She had met him once and actually talked to him when she was a child. She couldn't remember where; she couldn't recall his face. But the qualities of his personality she knew as she did her own heart. If they had existed once in one man, she would find them again, somewhere. That was the miracle she prayed for every summer.

She thought the miracle had happened again when she first came to Yosemite.

She found an open campsite by the river. While she was putting up her tent, the man from the camp beside hers came to help. At first he seemed the prototype of everything she hated—a good-looking, beautifully co-ordinated physical specimen, as sharp-witted as a jellyfish. The front of his woolen shirt hung carelessly unbuttoned. She saw the mat of dark hair on his chest, the sculpted curves of sun-tanned muscle. No doubt he considered himself quite attractive.

Then, that evening after the fire-fall, the young man asked her to go with him to the ranger's lecture at Camp Curry. Bertha discovered that he was a graduate physicist, employed by a large, commercial laboratory. They had at least the specialized area of science in common. By the time they returned from 

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