arrior 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 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
head-strap 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."

She grunted acknowledgment and gratitude for her lord's condescension,
slipped into the harness, and bent forward to the load.

"The next time I am born, I would be born a white man," he added, and
swung off down the trail which dived into the gorge at his feet.

The dogs followed close at his heels, and Li Wan brought up the rear.
But her thoughts were far away, across the Ice Mountains to the east,
to the little corner of the earth where her childhood had been lived.
Ever as a child, she remembered, she had been looked upon as strange,
as one with an affliction. Truly she had dreamed awake and been
scolded and beaten for the remarkable visions she saw, till, after a
time, she had outgrown them. But not utterly. Though they troubled her
no more waking, they came to her in her sleep, grown woman that she
was, and many a night of nightmare was hers, filled with fluttering
shapes, vague and meaningless. The talk with Canim had excited her,
and down all the twisted slant of the divide she harked back to the
mocking fantasies of her dreams.

"Let us take breath," Canim said, w