"That was lucky," admitted her husband, meaning more than he said, but it was a maxim in old days that a woman was little the better for praise.
"He will come again," he added doubtfully.
"Next time I—we will kill him," said Dêh-Yān a little above herself; "I will get more stones, and bigger, for his entertainment."
"Yes, he will be back again; not to-morrow, perhaps, but within a while, when he has turned it over in his mind and thinks we have forgotten him," resumed the man, ignoring the woman's brag.
Dêh-Yān was sensible of her master's silent censure, and of a sex-superiority too secure of itself to need assertion, and shrunk back half-meekly, half-resentfully, but within a little found herself rising quietly and resolutely against its injustice. It must be so at present, no doubt, but it should not always be so. Meanwhile, her husband, satisfied with the effects of the snubbing, was speaking again.
"We shall certainly be looked up before long. But, there is something I do not understand about that bear, Dêh-Yān. In my country, south of the ranges, a brown bear ambushes and waylays, but rarely attacks by day and in the open. Is it more usual here? Are thy people's weapons so weak that a bear has no fear of them? or is this a Ghost-Bear, thinkest thou?—This beast should either have followed your tribe down, or have laid up for the winter. What is he doing abroad in snow?—Is he a bear at all? Did any warrior of your tribe die during the past summer?"
"This was no Brown Bear—but a Grizzly of the Big Kind[2]—but—I think—" she paused, her hand over her mouth. "Saw-Kimo, the old chief's son, died—was found dead," she muttered reluctantly, for death is a very mysterious thing to your savage, and to speak of the recently deceased is unlucky; they may be about, anywhere, at your elbow, and may take offence; who can say?
"Was found dead?" questioned the man.