and fro. And Skulpin, who had dragged me down, shot with a pistol from
where he lay, and Ligoun toppled and fell, as an old pine topples and falls
in the teeth of the wind."
Palitlum ceased. His eyes, smouldering moodily, were bent upon the fire,
and his cheek was dark with blood.
"And thou, Palitlum ?" I demanded. "And thou ?"
"I ? I did remember the Law, and I slew Opitsah the Knife, which was
well. And I drew Ligoun's own knife from the throat of Niblack, and slew
Skulpin, who had dragged me down. For I was a stripling, and I could slay
any man and it were honor. And further, Ligoun being dead, there was no
need for my youth, and I laid about me with his knife, choosing the
chiefest of rank that yet remained."
Palitlum fumbled under his shirt and drew forth a beaded sheath, and from
the sheath, a knife. It was a knife home-wrought and crudely fashioned
from a whip-saw file; a knife such as one may find possessed by old men
in a hundred Alaskan villages.
"The knife of Ligoun?" I said, and Palitlum nodded.
"And for the knife of Ligoun," I said, "will I give thee ten bottles of 'Three
Star.'"
But Palitlum looked at me slowly. "Hair-Face, I am weak as water, and
easy as a woman. I have soiled my belly with quass and hooch, and 'Three
Star.' My eyes are blunted, my ears have lost their keenness, and my
strength has gone into fat. And I am without honor in these days, and am
called Palitlum, the Drinker. Yet honor was mine at the potlatch of
Niblack, on the Skoot, and the memory of it, and the memory of Ligoun,
be dear to me. Nay, didst thou turn the sea itself into 'Three Star' and say
that it were all mine for the knife, yet would I keep the knife. I am
Palitlum, the Drinker, but I was once Olo, the Ever-Hungry, who bore up
Ligoun with his youth!"
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"Thou art a great man, Palitlum," I said, "and I honor thee.',
Palitlum reached out his hand.
"The 'Three Star' between thy knees be mine for the tale I have told," he
said.
And as I looked on the frown of the cliff at our backs, I saw the shadow of
a man's torso, monstrous beneath a huge inverted bottle.
LI-WAN, THE FAIR
(First published in The Atlantic Monthly, Aug, 1902)
"THE sun sinks, Canim, and the heat of the day is gone!"
So called Li Wan to the man whose head was hidden beneath the squirrelskin
robe, but she called softly, as though divided between the duty of
waking him and the fear of him awake. For she was afraid of this big
husband of hers, who was like unto none of the men she had known.
The moose-meat sizzled uneasily, and she moved the frying-pan to one
side of the red embers. As she did so she glanced warily at the two Hudson
Bay dogs dripping eager slaver from their scarlet tongues and following
her every movement. They were huge, hairy fellows, crouched to leeward
in the thin smoke-wake of the fire to escape the swarming myriads of
mosquitoes. As Li Wan gazed down the steep to where the Klondike flung
its swollen flood between the hills, one of the dogs bellied its way forward
like a worm, and with a deft, catlike stroke of the paw dipped a chunk of
hot meat out of the pan to the ground. But Li Wan caught him from out the
tail of her eye, and he sprang back with a snap and a snarl as she rapped
him over the nose with a stick of firewood.
"Nay, Olo," she laughed, recovering the meat without removing her eye
from him. "Thou art ever hungry, and for that thy nose leads thee into
endless troubles."
But the mate of Olo joined him, and together they defied the woman. The
hair on their backs and shoulders bristled in recurrent waves of anger, and
the thin lips writhed and lifted into ugly wrinkles, exposing the fleshtearing
fangs, cruel and menacing. Their very noses serrulated and shook
in brute passion, and they snarled as the wolves snarl, with all the hatred
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and malignity of the breed impelling them to spring upon the woman and
drag her down.
"And thou, too, Bash, fierce as thy master and never at peace with the
hand that feeds thee! This is not thy quarrel, so that be shine! and that!"
As she cried, she drove at them with the firewood, but they avoided the
blows and refused to retreat. They separated and approached her from
either side, crouching low and snarling. Li Wan had struggled with the
wolf-dog for mastery from the time she toddled among the skin-bales of
the teepee, and she knew a crisis was at hand. Bash had halted, his
muscles stiff and tense for the spring; Olo was yet creeping into striking
distance.
Grasping two blazing sticks by the charred ends, she faced the brutes. The
one held back, but Bash sprang, and she met him in mid- air with the
flaming weapon. There were sharp yelps of pain and swift odors of
burning hair and flesh as he rolled in the dirt and the woman ground the
fiery embers into his mouth. Snapping wildly, he flung himself sidewise
out of her reach and in a frenzy of fear scrambled for safety. Olo, on the
other side, had begun his retreat, when Li Wan reminded him of her
primacy by hurling a heavy stick of wood into his ribs. Then the pair
retreated under a rain of firewood, and on the edge of the camp fell to
licking their wounds and whimpering by turns and snarling.
Li Wan blew the ashes off the meat and sat down again. Her heart had not
gone up a beat, and the incident was already old, for this was the routine
of life. Canim had not stirred during the disorder, but instead had set up a
lusty snoring.
"Come, Canim!" she called. "The heat of the day is gone, and the trail
waits for our feet."
The squirrel-skin robe was agitated and cast aside by a brown arm. Then
the man's eyelids fluttered and drooped again.
"His pack is heavy," she thought, "and he is tired with the work of the
morning."
A mosquito stung her on the neck, and she daubed the unprotected spot
with wet clay from a ball she had convenient to hand. All morning, toiling
up the divide and enveloped in a cloud of the pests, the man and woman
had plastered themselves with the sticky mud, which, drying in the sun,
covered their faces with masks of clay. These masks, broken in divers
places by the movement of the facial muscles, had constantly to be
renewed, so that the deposit was irregular of depth and peculiar of aspect.
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Li Wan shook Canim gently but with persistence till he roused and sat up.
His first glance was to the sun, and after consulting the celestial timepiece
he hunched over to the fire and fell-to ravenously on the meat. He was a
large Indian fully six feet in height, deep-cheated and heavy-muscled, and
his eyes were keener and vested with greater mental vigor than the average
of his kind. The lines of will had marked his face deeply, and this, coupled
with a sternness and primitiveness, advertised a native indomitability,
unswerving of purpose, and prone, when thwarted, to sullen cruelty.
"To-morrow, Li Wan, we shall feast." He sucked a marrow-bone clean and
threw it to the dogs. "We shall have flapjacks fried in bacon grease, and
sugar, which is more toothsome—"
"Flapjacks?" she questioned, mouthing the word curiously.
"Ay," Canim answered with superiority; "and I shall teach you new ways
of cookery. Of these things I speak you are ignorant, and of many more
things besides. You have lived your days in a little corner of the earth and
know nothing. But I,"—he straightened himself and looked at her
pridefully,—"I am a great traveller, and have been all places, even among
the white people, and I am versed in their ways, and in the ways of many
peoples. I am not a tree, born to stand in one place always and know not
what there be over the next hill; for I am Canim, the Canoe, made to go
here and there and to journey and quest up and down the length and
breadth of the world."
She bowed her head humbly. "It is true. I have eaten fish and meat and
berries all my days and lived in a little corner of the earth. Nor did I dream
the world was so large until you stole me from my people and I cooked
and carried for you on the endless trails." She looked up at him suddenly.
"Tell me, Canim, does this trail ever end?"
"Nay," he answered. "My trail is like the world; it never ends. My trail is
the world, and I have travelled it since the time my legs could carry me,
and I shall travel it until I die. My father and my mother may be dead, but
it is long since I looked upon them, and I do not care. My tribe is like your
tribe. It stays in the one place—which is far from here,—but I care naught
for my tribe, for I am Canim, the Canoe!"
"And must I, Li Wan, who am weary, travel always your trail until I die?"
"You, Li Wan, are my wife, and the wife travels the husband's trail
wheresoever it goes. It is the law. And were it not the law, yet would it be
the law of Canim, who is lawgiver unto himself and his."
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She bowed her head again, for she knew no other law than that man was
the master of woman.
"Be not in haste," Canim cautioned her, as she began to strap the meagre
camp outfit to her pack. "The sun is yet hot, and the trail leads down and
the footing is good."
She dropped her work obediently and resumed her seat.
Canim regarded her with speculative interest. "You do not squat on your
hams like other women," he remarked.
"No," she answered. "It never came easy. It tires me, and I cannot take my
rest that way."
"And why is it your feet point not straight before you ?"
"I do not know, save that they are unlike the feet of other women.
A satisfied light crept into his eyes, but otherwise he gave no sign.
"Like other women, your hair is black; but have you ever noticed that it is
soft and fine, softer and finer than the hair of other women?"
"I have noticed," she answered shortly, for she was not pleased at such
cold analysis of her sex-deficiencies.
"It is a year, now, since I took you from your people," he went on, "and
you are nigh as shy and afraid of me as when first I looked upon you. How
does this thing be?"
Li Wan shook her head. "I am afraid of you, Canim, you are so big and
strange. And further, before you looked upon me even, I was afraid of all
the young men. I do not know . . . I cannot say . . . only it seemed,
somehow, as though I should not be for them, as though . . ."
"Ay," he encouraged, impatient at her faltering.
"As though they were not my kind."
"Not your kind?" he demanded slowly. "Then what is your kind?"
"I do not know, I . . ." She shook her head in a bewildered manner. "I
cannot put into words the way I felt. It was strangeness in me. I was unlike
other maidens, who sought the young men slyly. I could not care for the
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young men that way. It would have been a great wrong, it seemed, and an
ill deed."
"What is the first thing you remember?" Canim asked with abrupt
irrelevance.
"Pow-Wah-Kaan, my mother."
"And naught else before Pow-Wah-Kaan?"
"Naught else."
But Canim, holding her eyes with his, searched her secret soul and saw it
waver.
"Think, and think hard, Li Wan!" he threatened.
She stammered, and her eyes were piteous and pleading, but his will
dominated her and wrung from her lips the reluctant speech.
"But it was only dreams, Canim, ill dreams of childhood, shadows of
things not real, visions such as the dogs, sleeping in the sun-warmth,
behold and whine out against."
"Tell me," he commanded, "of the things before Pow-Wah-Kaan, your
mother."
"They are forgotten memories," she protested. "As a child I dreamed
awake, with my eyes open to the day, and when I spoke of the strange
things I saw I was laughed at, and the other children were afraid and drew
away from me. And when I spoke of the things I saw to Pow-Wah- Kaan,
she chided me and said they were evil; also she beat me. It was a sickness,
I believe, like the falling-sickness that comes to old men; and in time I
grew better and dreamed no more. And now . . . I cannot ; remember"—
she brought her hand in a confused manner to her forehead—"they are
there, somewhere, but I cannot find them, only . . ."
"Only," Canim repeated, holding her.
"Only one thing. But you will laugh at its foolishness, it is so unreal. "
"Nay, Li Wan. Dreams are dreams. They may be memories of other lives
we have lived. I was once a moose. I firmly believe I was once a moose,
what of the things I have seen in dreams, and heard."
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Strive as he would to hide it, a growing anxiety was manifest, but Li Wan,
groping after the words with which to paint the picture, took no heed.
"I see a snow-tramped space among the trees," she began, "and across the
snow the sign of a man where he has dragged himself heavily on hand and
knee. And I see, too, the man in the snow, and it seems I am very close to
him when I look. He is unlike real men, for he has hair on his face, much
hair, and the hair of his face and head is yellow like the summer coat of
the weasel. His eyes are closed, but they open and search about. They are
blue like the sky, and look into mine and search no more. And his hand
moves, slow, as from weakness, and I feel . . ."
"Ay," Canim whispered hoarsely. "You feel—?" "No! no !" she cried in
haste. "I feel nothing. Did I say 'feel'? I did not mean it. It could not be that
I should mean it. I see, and I see only, and that is all I see—a man in the
snow, with eyes like the sky, and hair like the weasel. I have seen it many
times, and always it is the same—a man in the sno
w—"
"And do you see yourself ?" he asked, leaning forward and regarding her
intently. "Do you ever see yourself and the man in the snow?" "Why
should I see myself? Am I not real?"
His muscles relaxed and he sank back, an exultant satisfaction in his eyes
which he turned from her so that she might not see.
"I will tell you, Li Wan," he spoke decisively; "you were a little bird in
some life before, a little moose-bird, when you saw this thing, and the
memory of it is with you yet. It is not strange. I was once a moose, and my
father's father afterward became a bear—so said the shaman, and the
shaman cannot lie. Thus, on the Trail of the Gods we pass from life to life,
and the gods know only and understand. Dreams and the shadows of
dreams be memories, nothing more, and the dog, whining asleep in the
sun-warmth, doubtless sees and remembers things gone before. Bash,
there, was a warrior once. I do firmly believe he was once a warrior."
Canim tossed a bone to the brute and got upon his feet. "Come, let us
begone. The sun is yet hot, but it will get no cooler."
"And these white people, what are they like?" Li Wan made bold to ask.
"Like you and me," he answered, "only they are less dark of skin. You will
be among them ere the day is dead."
Canim lashed the sleeping-robe to his one-hundred-and-fifty-pound pack,
smeared his face with wet clay, and sat down to rest till Li Wan had
finished loading the dogs. Olo cringed at sight of the club in her hand, and
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gave no trouble when the bundle of forty pounds and odd was strapped
upon him. But Bash was aggrieved and truculent, and could not forbear to
whimper and snarl as he was forced to receive the burden. He bristled his
back and bared his teeth as she drew the straps tight, the while throwing
all the malignancy of his nature into the glances shot at her sideways and
backward. And Canim chuckled and said, "Did I not say he was once a
very great warrior?"
"These furs will bring a price," he remarked as he adjusted his headstrap
and lifted his pack clear of the ground. "A big price. The white men pay
well for such goods, for they have no time to hunt and are soft to the cold.
Soon shall we feast, Li Wan, as you have feasted never in all the lives you
have lived before."
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