* * * * * *

“Listen to me,” said McCan.  “The spring thaw is here, an’ the crust is comin’ on the snow.  It’s the time to travel, exceptin’ for the spring blizzards in the mountains.  I know them.  I would run with no less a man than you.”

“But you can’t run,” Smoke contradicted.  “You can keep up with no man.  Your backbone is limber as thawed marrow.  If I run, I run alone.  The world fades, and perhaps I shall never run.  Caribou meat is very good, and soon will come summer and the salmon.”

Said Snass:  “Your partner is dead.  My hunters did not kill him.  They found the body, frozen in the first of the spring storms in the mountains.  No man can escape.  When shall we celebrate your marriage?”

And Labiskwee:  “I watch you.  There is trouble in your eyes, in your face.  Oh, I do know all your face.  There is a little scar on your neck, just under the ear.  When you are happy, the corners of your mouth turn up.  When you think sad thoughts they turn down.  When you smile there are three and four wrinkles at the corners of your eyes.  When you laugh there are six.  Sometimes I have almost counted seven.  But I cannot count them now.  I have never read books.  I do not know how to read.  But Four Eyes taught me much.  My grammar is good.  He taught me.  And in his own eyes I have seen the trouble of the hunger for the world.  He was often hungry for the world.  Yet here was good meat, and fish in plenty, and the berries and the roots, and often flour came back for the furs through the Porcupines and the Luskwas.  Yet was he hungry for the world.  Is the world so good that you, too, are hungry for it?  Four Eyes had nothing.  But you have me.”  She sighed and shook her head.  “Four Eyes died still hungry for the world.  And if you lived here always would you, too, die hungry for the world?  I am afraid I do not know the world.  Do you want to run away to the world?”

Smoke could not speak, but by his mouth-corner lines was she convinced.

Minutes of silence passed, in which she visibly struggled, while Smoke cursed himself for the unguessed weakness that enabled him to speak the truth about his hunger for the world while it kept his lips tight on the truth of the existence of the other woman.

Again Labiskwee sighed.

“Very well.  I love you more than I fear my father’s anger, and he is more terrible in anger than a mountain storm.  You told me what love is.  This is the test of love.  I shall help you to run away back to the world.”

Smoke awakened softly and without movement.  Warm small fingers touched his cheek and slid gently to a pressure on his lips.  Fur, with the chill of frost clinging in it, next tingled his skin, and the one word, “Come,” was breathed in his ear.  He sat up carefully and listened.  The hundreds of wolf-dogs in the camp had lifted their nocturnal song, but under the volume of it, close at hand, he could distinguish the light, regular breathing of Snass.