The men and women shrank away, and the children scuttled off between their legs.  Only Opee-Kwan was brave, as befitted the head man of the village.  He strode forward and gazed long and earnestly at the new-comer.

“It is Nam-Bok,” he said at last, and at the conviction in his voice the women wailed apprehensively and drew farther away.

The lips of the stranger moved indecisively, and his brown throat writhed and wrestled with unspoken words.

“La la, it is Nam-Bok,” Bask-Wah-Wan croaked, peering up into his face.  “Ever did I say Nam-Bok would come back.”

“Ay, it is Nam-Bok come back.”  This time it was Nam-Bok himself who spoke, putting a leg over the side of the bidarka and standing with one foot afloat and one ashore.  Again his throat writhed and wrestled as he grappled after forgotten words.  And when the words came forth they were strange of sound and a spluttering of the lips accompanied the gutturals.  “Greeting, O brothers,” he said, “brothers of old time before I went away with the off-shore wind.”

He stepped out with both feet on the sand, and Opee-Kwan waved him back.

“Thou art dead, Nam-Bok,” he said.

Nam-Bok laughed.  “I am fat.”

“Dead men are not fat,” Opee-Kwan confessed.  “Thou hast fared well, but it is strange.  No man may mate with the off-shore wind and come back on the heels of the years.”

“I have come back,” Nam-Bok answered simply.

“Mayhap thou art a shadow, then, a passing shadow of the Nam-Bok that was.  Shadows come back.”

“I am hungry.  Shadows do not eat.”

But Opee-Kwan doubted, and brushed his hand across his brow in sore puzzlement.  Nam-Bok was likewise puzzled, and as he looked up and down the line found no welcome in the eyes of the fisherfolk.  The men and women whispered together.  The children stole timidly back among their elders, and bristling dogs fawned up to him and sniffed suspiciously.

“I bore thee, Nam-Bok, and I gave thee suck when thou wast little,” Bask-Wah-Wan whimpered, drawing closer; “and shadow though thou be, or no shadow, I will give thee to eat now.”

Nam-Bok made to come to her, but a growl of fear and menace warned him back.  He said something in a strange tongue which sounded like “Goddam,” and added, “No shadow am I, but a man.”

“Who may know concerning the things of mystery?” Opee-Kwan demanded, half of himself and half of his tribespeople.  “We are, and in a breath we are not.  If the man may become shadow, may not the shadow become man?  Nam-Bok was, but is not.  This we know, but we do not know if this be Nam-Bok or the shadow of Nam-Bok.”

Nam-Bok cleared his throat and made answer.  “In the old time long ago, thy father’s father, Opee-Kwan, went away and came back on the heels of the years.  Nor was a place by the fire denied him.  It is said ...”  He paused significantly, and they hung on his utterance.  “It is said,” he repeated, driving his point home with deliberation, “that Sipsip, his klooch, bore him two sons after he came back.”