ep to the rear, he stationed Zarinska, her proper place.
Besides, the time was ripe for mischief, and there was need to guard
his back.

On either side, the men crouched to the fire, their voices lifted in a
folk-chant out of the forgotten past. Full of strange, halting cadences
and haunting recurrences, it was not beautiful. 'Fearful' may
inadequately express it. At the lower end, under the eye of the Shaman,
danced half a score of women. Stern were his reproofs of those who did
not wholly abandon themselves to the ecstasy of the rite. Half hidden
in their heavy masses of raven hair, all dishevelled and falling to
their waists, they slowly swayed to and fro, their forms rippling to an
ever-changing rhythm.

It was a weird scene; an anachronism. To the south, the nineteenth
century was reeling off the few years of its last decade; here
flourished man primeval, a shade removed from the prehistoric
cave-dweller, forgotten fragment of the Elder World. The tawny
wolf-dogs sat between their skin-clad masters or fought for room, the
firelight cast backward from their red eyes and dripping fangs. The
woods, in ghostly shroud, slept on unheeding.

The White Silence, for the moment driven to the rimming forest, seemed
ever crushing inward; the stars danced with great leaps, as is their
wont in the time of the Great Cold; while the Spirits of the Pole
trailed their robes of glory athwart the heavens.

'Scruff' Mackenzie dimly realized the wild grandeur of the setting as
his eyes ranged down the fur-fringed sides in quest of missing faces.
They rested for a moment on a newborn babe, suckling at its mother's
naked breast. It was forty below,--seven and odd degrees of frost. He
thought of the tender women of his own race and smiled grimly. Yet from
the loins of some such tender woman had he sprung with a kingly
inheritance,--an inheritance which gave to him and his dominance over
the land and sea, over the animals and the peoples of all the zones.
Single-handed against fivescore, girt by the Arctic winter, far from
his own, he felt the prompting of his heritage, the desire to possess,
the wild danger--love, the thrill of battle, the power to conquer or to
die.

The singing and the dancing ceased, and the Shaman flared up in rude
eloquence.

Through the sinuosities of their vast mythology, he worked cunningly
upon the credulity of his people. The case was strong. Opposing the
creative principles as embodied in the Crow and th