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

"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 muscle