own way, ere they could slay him. And as I say, he went slowly, and
knives bit into him, and he was red with blood. And though none sought
after me, who was a mere stripling, yet did the knives find me, and the hot
bullets burn me. And still Ligoun leaned his weight on my youth, and
Opitsah struck at him, and we three went forward. And when we stood by
Niblack, he was afraid, and covered his head with his blanket. The Skoots
were ever cowards.
“And Goolzug and Kadishan, the one a fish-eater and the other a meatkiller,
closed together for the honor of their tribes. And they raged madly
about, and in their battling swung against the knees of Opitsah, who was
overthrown and trampled upon. And a knife, singing through the air,
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smote Skulpin, of the Sitkas, in the throat, and he flung his arms out
blindly, reeling, and dragged me down in his fall.
“And from the ground I beheld Ligoun bend over Niblack, and uncover
the blanket from his head, and turn up his face to the light. And Ligoun
was in no haste. Being blinded with his own blood, he swept it out of his
eyes with the back of his hand, so he might see and be sure. And when he
was sure that the upturned face was the face of Niblack, he drew the knife
across his throat as one draws a knife across the throat of a trembling deer.
And then Ligoun stood erect, singing his deathsong and swaying gently to
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