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"Flapjacks?" she questioned, mouthing the word curiously. "Ay," Canim answered with superiority; "and I shall teach you new ways of cookery. Of these things I speak you are ignorant, and of many more things besides. You have lived your days in a little corner of the earth and know nothing.
"But it was only dreams, Canim, ill dreams of childhood, shadows of things not real, visions such as the dogs, sleeping in the sun-warmth, behold and whine out against." "Tell me," he commanded, "of the things before Pow-Wah-Kaan, your mother." "They are forgotten memories," she protested.
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 Canim, holding her eyes with his, searched her secret soul and saw it waver. "Think, and think hard, Li Wan!" he threatened. She stammered, and her eyes were piteous and pleading, but his will dominated her and wrung from her lips the reluctant speech.
I am not a tree, born to stand in one place always and know not what there be over the next hill; for I am Canim, the Canoe, made to go here and there and to journey and quest up and down the length and breadth of the world." She bowed her head humbly. "It is true. I have eaten fish and meat and berries all my days and lived in a little corner of the earth.
She was sick and fainting, and could only listen to the ravishing sounds which proceeded from the cabin in a wonderful rhythm. "Hum, fiddle," Canim vouchsafed. But she did not hear him, for in the ecstasy she was experiencing, it seemed at last that all things were coming clear. Now! now! she thought. A sudden moisture swept into her eyes, and the tears trickled down her cheeks.
"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.
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. "Canim," she whispered in an agony of apprehension. "Canim, what is that?"
"It is a year, now, since I took you from your people," he went on, "and you are nigh as shy and afraid of me as when first I looked upon you. How does this thing be?" Li Wan shook her head. "I am afraid of you, Canim, you are so big and strange. And further, before you looked upon me even, I was afraid of all the young men.
His eyes are closed, but they open and search about. They are blue like the sky, and look into mine and search no more. And his hand moves, slow, as from weakness, and I feel ..." "Ay," Canim whispered hoarsely. "You feel ?" "No! no!" she cried in haste. "I feel nothing. Did I say 'feel'? I did not mean it. It could not be that I should mean it.
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