“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 flesh-tearing fangs, cruel and menacing.  Their very noses serrulated and shook in brute passion, and they snarled as the wolves snarl, with all the hatred 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 thine! 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.