Li Wan, the Fair
"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
squirrel-skin 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 flesh-tearing fangs, cruel and menacing. Their very noses serrulated and shook in brute passion, and they snarled as the wolves snarl, with all the hatred 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 thine! 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.