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, when they had tapped midway the bed of the main creek.

He rested his pack on a jutting rock, slipped the head-strap, and sat down.  Li Wan joined him, and the dogs sprawled panting on the ground beside them.  At their feet rippled the glacial drip of the hills, but it was muddy and discolored, as if soiled by some commotion of the earth.

“Why is this?” Li Wan asked.

“Because of the white men who work in the ground.  Listen!” He held up his hand, and they heard the ring of pick and shovel, and the sound of men’s voices.  “They are made mad by gold, and work without ceasing that they may find it. Gold? It is yellow and comes from the ground, and is considered of great value.  It is also a measure of price.”

But Li Wan’s roving eyes had called her attention from him.  A few yards below and partly screened by a clump of young spruce, the tiered logs of a cabin rose to meet its overhanging roof of dirt.  A thrill ran through her, and all her dream-phantoms roused up and stirred about uneasily.