through his fingers.

"'Let your shamans work wonders the like of which I have done this
night,' I says. 'Let them call Killisnoo down out of the sky whither I
have sent her.' But the priests knew their limits. 'May your _klooches_
bear you sons as the spawn of the salmon,' I says, turning to go; 'and
may your totem pole stand long in the land, and the smoke of your camp
rise always.'

"But if the beggars could have seen me hitting the high places for the
sloop as soon as I was clear of them, they'd thought my own medicine had
got after me. Tilly'd kept warm by chopping the ice away, and was all
ready to cast off. Gawd! how we ran before it, the Taku howling after us
and the freezing seas sweeping over at every clip. With everything
battened down, me a-steering and Tilly chopping ice, we held on half the
night, till I plumped the sloop ashore on Porcupine Island, and we
shivered it out on the beach; blankets wet, and Tilly drying the matches
on her breast.

"So I think I know something about it. Seven years, Dick, man and wife,
in rough sailing and smooth. And then she died, in the heart of the
winter, died in childbirth, up there on the Chilcat Station. She held my
hand to the last, the ice creeping up inside the door and spreading thick
on the gut of the window. Outside, the lone howl of the wolf and the
Silence; inside, death and the Silence. You've never heard the Silence
yet, Dick, and Gawd grant you don't ever have to hear it when you sit by
the side of death. Hear it? Ay, till the breath whistles like a siren,
and the heart booms, booms, booms, like the surf on the shore.

"Siwash, Dick, but a woman. White, Dick, white, clear through. Towards