She was named for a cousin and forever afterward felt the premise and the setting on of hands, of 1 hand most especially, which was, in fact, never laid upon any fragment of her flesh nor came anywhere near it. It was a memory of others, a figment, and what was that to possess and pet? 
        Cousin Carrie,  for Carrie's mother, was the heroine who took the Northwest in her passion fashioned it anew, took it like a frightened bird out of the jaws of forgetting and serrated ignorance which would have torn it, shredded it to waste and profit she took it and in her hands, her square, heavy, long-fingered hands which feared nothing, acknowledged nothing beyond her desires and intent, not even fear that whispers round the close spreading the tar of evil upon the stones. 
        She, of well-fleshed shoulders and striding thighs penetrated sitkas, hemlocks, cedars and young pines and never discouraged them by word or tool and caught by method uncontained, transfiguring, the brown bears, owls, seals and foxes, the deer and karst droplets of the secret depths of Tongass, mixed into the coiling winds and told the tides their number, flux, and histories from Japan to Mexico. 
        She knew them. She took them into herself where crucibles of mighty transformation were gentle, uncannily gentle, and their essence was spun forth glistening and lasting, new and enviable, and the people knew they held a precious thing. 
        Carrie held her galleries in her heart as she milked the goats and cows of her girlhood. 
        She walked upon the cliffs stark standing above a crashing sea which was an ocean called pacific by the hopeful, it would seem, or the mapmakers waxing grandiose these warm and ruddy, sanguine and voluble makers of maps as though they could be creators of what was there; they were, that's a fact. 
        Her full skirts blew in the moist spring winds in sunshine yellow as mustard when the waters were like blue lupine. They billowed and snapped about her and she bent to stroke the bony heads and cup the tender muzzles for the seeking brown eyes of her friends spoke tales as wondrous and varied as the sails glimpsed far out beyond the rocky islands whose coldness sheltered rookeries. The birds were above like talismans. 
        Carrie milked and made cheeses in Marin pressing the whey through clean cloths with her pink capable hands while tresses crossed her full white throat. 
        She milked, made cheeses, pitched alfalfa and barley; she traveled once to Shohomish with her father. He sang or was silent and smoked a pipe once on Sundays.
 

        Elaine stared in disbelief  possibly silenced by the inordinate waste she had witnessed like the flap of a broken sloop's jib but more like the sad dusty weight of curtain for a sour stage. Carrie saw it and laughed again.
        But what else could she do, Rose indicated with that movement of shoulder there, at the joint, which was particular to her coming from chintz-safe rooms and bordered carpets, Carrie being what she was.
        And what was that? I wondered mightily that 1st time but not only then. What was that?