Book: The Shagganappi

E >> E. Pauline Johnson >> The Shagganappi




It was daylight. Something had wakened him abruptly. Instantly all
his faculties were alert, yet oddly enough he seemed held rigid and
speechless. He wanted to cry out with fear, he knew not of what, and
the next moment a lithe red body was flung across his, and his hand was
imprisoned in strong, clinging fingers. There was a brief struggle, a
torrent of words he did not understand, a woman's frightened voice.
Then the lithe red body, North Eagle's body, lifted itself, and Tony
struggled up, white, scared, and bewildered. The Blackfoot boy was
crouching at his elbow, and some terrible thing was winding and lashing
itself about his thin dark wrist and arm. It seemed a lifetime that
Tony's staring eyes were riveted on the horror of the thing but it
really was all over in a moment, and the Indian had choked a brutal
rattlesnake, then flung it at his feet. No one spoke for a full minute,
then North Eagle said, very quietly, "He curl one foot from your right
hand, he lift his head to strike. I wake--I catch him just below his
head--he is dead."

Again there was silence. Then North Eagle's mother came slowly, placed
one hand on her son's shoulder, the other on Tony's, and looking down at
the dead reptile, shook her head meaningly. And Tony, still sitting on
the wolf skins, stretched out his arms and clasped them about North
Eagle's knees.

Mrs. Allan was right--the Indian boy had risked his life to save her son
from danger. Rattlesnakes were so rare in the Blackfoot country that it
gave them all a great shock. It was almost too tense and terrible a
thing to talk much of, and the strain of it relaxed only when the boys
were mounted once more, galloping swiftly away toward Gleichen and the
train.

But, notwithstanding this fright, Tony left the tepee with the greatest
regret. Before going, North Eagle's mother presented him with a very
beautiful pair of moccasins and a valuable string of elk's teeth, and
North Eagle translated her good-bye words: "My mother says you will live
in her heart; that your hair is very beautiful; that she feels the sun's
heat in her heart for you, because you do not speak loud to her."

It was a glorious, breezy gallop of ten miles in the early morning, and
as they came up the trail Tony could distinguish his mother, already
on the watch, waving a welcome as far as her eyes could discern them.
Outside the settlement the boys slackened speed, and talked regretfully
of their coming separation. North Eagle was wearing an extremely
handsome buckskin shirt, fringed and richly beaded. He began unfastening
it. "I give you my shirt," he said. "My mother says it is the best she
ever made--it is yours."

For a second Tony's thoughts were busy, then, without hesitation, he,
too, unfastened his shirt, which luckily was a fine blue silk "soft"
one. "And I give you mine," he said simply.

Thus did they exchange shirts, and rode up to the station platform, the
Indian stripped to the waist, with only a scarlet blanket about his
shoulders, and a roll of blue silk under his arm; the Toronto boy with
his coat buttoned up to conceal his underwear, and a gorgeous garment
of buckskin across his saddle bow.

The greetings and welcomings were many and merry. Professor and Mrs.
Allan were hardly able to take their eyes from their restored son.
But the shadow of the coming good-bye hung above Tony's face, and he
experienced only one great glad moment on the station platform. It
was when Sleeping Thunder came up, and before all the passengers,
deliberately took the eagle plume from his hair and slipped it into
Tony's hand. Then North Eagle spoke: "My father says you are brave,
and must accept the plume of the brave. His heart turns to you. You
do not speak loud to him."

"All aboard for Calgary!" came the voice of the train conductor. For a
moment the clinging fingers of the Indian and the white boy met, and
some way or other Tony found himself stumbling up the steps into the
Pullman, and as the train pulled out towards the foothills he stood on
the rear platform watching the little station and the tepees slip away,
away, away, conscious of but two things--that his eyes were fighting
bravely to keep a mist from blinding them, and that his hands were
holding the eagle plume of Sleeping Thunder.



Hoolool of the Totem Pole

A Story of the North Pacific Coast


The upcoast people called her "Hoolool," which means "The Mouse" in the
Chinook tongue. For was she not silent as the small, grey creature that
depended on its own bright eyes and busy little feet to secure a living?

The fishermen and prospectors had almost forgotten the time when she
had not lived alone with her little son, "Tenas," for although Big Joe,
her husband, had been dead but four years, time travels slowly north
of Queen Charlotte Sound, and four years on the "Upper Coast" drag
themselves more leisurely than twelve at the mouth of the Fraser River.
Big Joe had left her with but three precious possessions--"Tenas," their
boy, the warm, roomy firwood house of the thrifty Pacific Coast Indian
build, and the great Totem Pole that loomed outside at its northwestern
corner like a guardian of her welfare and the undeniable hallmark of
their child's honorable ancestry and unblemished lineage.

After Big Joe died Hoolool would have been anchorless without that Totem
Pole. Its extraordinary carving, its crude but clever coloring, its
massed figures of animals, birds and humans, all designed and carved
out of the solid trunk of a single tree, meant a thousand times more to
her than it did to the travellers who, in their great "Klondike rush,"
thronged the decks of the northern-bound steamboats; than it did even
to those curio-hunters who despoil the Indian lodges of their ancient
wares, leaving their white man's coin in lieu of old silver bracelets
and rare carvings in black slate or finely woven cedar-root baskets.

Many times was she offered money for it, but Hoolool would merely shake
her head, and, with a half smile, turn away, giving no reason for her
refusal.

"The woman is like a mouse," those would-be purchasers would say, so
"Hoolool" she became, even to her little son, who called her the quaint
word as a white child would call its mother a pet name; and she in
turn called the little boy "Tenas," which means "Youngness"--the young
spring, the young day, the young moon--and he was all these blessed
things to her. But all the old-timers knew well why she would never
part with the Totem Pole.

"No use to coax her," they would tell the curio-hunters. "It is to her
what your family crest is to you. Would you sell your _crest_?"

So year after year the greedy-eyed collectors would go away
empty-handed, their coin in their pockets, and Hoolool's silent refusal
in their memories.

Yet how terribly she really needed their money she alone knew. To be
sure, she had her own firewood in the forest that crept almost to her
door, and in good seasons the salmon fishing was a great help. She
caught and smoked and dried this precious food, stowing it away for
use through the long winter months; but life was a continual struggle,
and Tenas was yet too young to help her in the battle.

Sometimes when the silver coins were very, very scarce, when her
shoulders ached with the cold, and her lips longed for tea and her mouth
for bread, when the smoked salmon revolted her, and her thin garments
grew thinner, she would go out and stand gazing at the Totem Pole, and
think of the great pile of coin that the last "collector" had offered
for it--a pile of coin that would fill all her needs until Tenas was
old enough to help her, to take his father's place at the hunting, the
fishing, and above all, in the logging camps up the coast.

"I would sell it to-day if they came," she would murmur. "I would not be
strong enough to refuse, to say no."

Then Tenas, knowing her desperate thoughts, would slip, mouse-like,
beside her and say:

"Hoolool, you are looking with love on our great Totem Pole--with love,
as you always do. It means that I shall be a great man some day, does it
not, Hoolool?"

Then the treachery of her thoughts would roll across her heart like a
crushing weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for
flour-bread, no shivering in thin garments, would ever drive her to part
with it. For the grotesque, carven thing was the very birthright of
her boy. Every figure, hewn with infinite patience by his sire's, his
grandsire's, his great-grandsire's, hands meant the very history from
which sprang the source of red blood in his young veins, the birth of
each generation, its deeds of valor, its achievements, its honors, its
undeniable right to the family name.

Should Tenas grow to youth, manhood, old age, and have no Totem Pole to
point to as a credential of being the honorable son of a long line of
honorable sons? Never! She would suffer in silence, like the little
grey, hungry Hoolool that scampered across the bare floors of her
firwood shack in the chill night hours, but her boy must have his
birthright. And so the great pole stood unmoved, baring its grinning
figures to the storms, the suns, the grey rains of the Pacific Coast,
but by its very presence it was keeping these tempests from entering
the heart of the lonely woman at its feet.

It was the year that spring came unusually early, weeks earlier than the
oldest Indian recalled its ever having come before. March brought the
wild geese honking northward, and great flocks of snow-white swans came
daily out of the southern horizon to sail overhead and lose themselves
along the Upper Coast, for it was mating and nesting time, and the heat
of the south had driven them early from its broad lagoons.

Every evening Tenas would roll himself in his blanket bed, while he
chatted about the migrating birds, and longed for the time when he would
be a great hunter, able to shoot the game as they flitted southward with
their large families in September.

"_Then_, Hoolool, we will have something better to eat than the smoked
salmon," he would say.

"Yes, little loved one," she would reply, "and you are growing so fast,
so big, that the time will not be long now before you can hunt down the
wild birds for your Hoolool to eat, eh, little Spring Eyes? But now you
must go to sleep; perhaps you will dream of the great flocks of the fat,
young, grey geese you are to get us for food."

"I'll tell you if I do; I'll tell you in the morning if I dream of the
little geese," he would reply, his voice trailing away into dreamland as
his eyes blinked themselves to sleep.

"Hoolool, I _did_ dream last night," he told her one early April day,
when he awoke dewy-eyed and bird-like from a long night's rest. "But it
was not of the bands of grey geese; it was of our great Totem Pole."

"Did it speak to you in your dreams, little April Eyes?" she asked,
playfully.

"No-o," he hesitated, "it did not really _speak_, but it showed me
something strange. Do you think it will come true, Hoolool?" His
dark, questioning eyes were pathetic in appeal. He _did_ want it to
come true.

"Tell your Hoolool," she replied indulgently, "and perhaps she can
decide if the dream will come true."

"You know how I longed to dream of the great flocks of young geese
flying southward in September," he said, longingly, his little thin
elbows propped each on one of her knees, his small, dark chin in his
hands, his wonderful eyes shadowy with the fairy dreams of childhood.
"But the flocks I saw were not flying grey geese, that make such fat
eating, but around the foot of our Totem Pole I saw flocks and flocks of
little tenas Totem Poles, hundreds of them. They were not _half_ as high
as I am. They were just baby ones you could take in your hand, Hoolool.
Could you take my knife the trader gave me and make me one just like our
big one? Only make it little, young--oh, _very_ tenas--that I can carry
it about with me. I'll paint it. Will you make me one, Hoolool?"

The woman sat still, a peculiar stillness that came of half fear, half
unutterable relief, and wholly of inspiration. Then she caught up the
boy, and her arms clung about him as if they would never release him.

"I know little of the white man's God," she murmured, "except that He is
good, but I know that the Great Tyee (god) of the West is surely good.
One of them has sent you this dream, my little April Eyes."

"Perhaps the Great Tyee and the white man's God are the same," the
child said, innocent of expressing a wonderful truth. "_You_ have two
names--'Marna' (mother, in the Chinook) and 'Hoolool'--yet you are the
same. Maybe it's that way with the two Great Tyees, the white man's and
ours. But why should they send me dreams of flocks of baby Totem Poles?"

"Because Hoolool will make _you_ one to-day, and then flocks and flocks
of tenas poles for the men with the silver coins. I cannot sell them our
great one, but I can make many small ones like it. Oh! they will buy the
little totems, and the great one will stand as the pride of your manhood
and the honor of your old age." Her voice rang with the hope of the
future, the confidence of years of difficulty overcome.

Before many hours had passed, she and the child had scoured the nearby
edges of the forest for woods that were dried, seasoned, and yet solid.
They had carried armfuls back to the fir shack, and the work of carving
had begun. The woman sat by the fire hour after hour--the fire that
burned in primitive fashion in the centre of the shack, stoveless and
hearthless, its ascending smoke curling up through an aperture in the
roof, its red flames flickering and fading, leaping and lighting the
work that even her unaccustomed fingers developed with wonderful
accuracy in miniature of the Totem Pole at the north-west corner
outside. By nightfall it was completed, and by the fitful firelight
Tenas painted and stained its huddled figures in the black, orange,
crimson and green that tribal custom made law. The warmth of the burning
cedar knots dried the paints and pigments, until their acrid fragrance
filled the little room, and the child's eyelids drooped sleepily, and in
a delightful happiness he once more snuggled into his blanket bed, the
baby Totem Pole hugged to his little heart. But his mother sat far into
the night, her busy fingers at work on the realization of her child's
dream. She was determined to fashion his dream-flock of "young" totems
which would bring to them both more of fat eating than many bands of
grey geese flying southward. The night wore on, and she left her task
only to rebuild the fire and to cover with an extra blanket the little
form of her sleeping boy. Finally she, too, slept, but briefly, for
daybreak found her again at her quaint occupation, and the following
nightfall brought no change. A week drifted by, and one morning, far
down the Sound, the whistle of a coming steamer startled both boy and
woman into brisk action. The little flock of Totem Poles now numbered
nine, and hastily gathering them together in one of her cherished
cedar-root baskets she clasped the child's hand, and they made their
way to the landing-stage.

When she returned an hour later, her basket was empty, and her kerchief
filled with silver coins.

On the deck of the steamer one of the ship's officers was talking to a
little group of delighted tourists who were comparing their miniature
purchases with the giant Totem Pole in the distance.

"You _are_ lucky," said the officer. "I know people who have tried
for years to buy the big Pole from her, but it was always 'No' with
her--just a shake of her head, and you might as well try to buy the
moon. It's for that little boy of hers she's keeping it, though she
could have sold it for hundreds of good dollars twenty times over."

That all happened eleven years ago, and last summer when I journeyed far
north of Queen Charlotte Sound, as the steamer reached a certain landing
I saw a giant Totem Pole with a well-built frame house at its base.
It was standing considerably away from the shore, but its newness was
apparent, for on its roof, busily engaged at shingling, was an agile
Indian youth of some seventeen years.

"That youngster built that house all by himself," volunteered one of the
ship's officers at my elbow. "He is a born carpenter, and gets all the
work he can do. He has supported his mother in comfort for two years,
and he isn't full grown yet."

"Who is he?" I asked, with keen interest.

"His name is Tenas," replied the officer. "His mother is a splendid
woman. 'Hoolool,' they call her. She is quite the best carver of Totem
Poles on the North Coast."



The Wolf-Brothers


Leloo's father and mother were both of the great Lillooet tribe of
British Columbia Indians, splendid people of a stalwart race of red men,
who had named the boy Leloo because, from the time he could toddle about
on his little, brown, bare feet, he had always listened with delight
to the wolves howling across the canyons and down the steeps of the
wonderful mountain country where he was born. In the Chinook language
Leloo means wolf, and before the little fellow could talk he would stand
nightly at the lodge door and imitate the long, weird barking and
calling of his namesakes, while his father would smile knowingly and
say, "He will some day make a great hunter, will our little Leloo," and
his mother would answer proudly, "Yes, he has no fear of wild things.
No wolf in the mountains will be mighty enough to scare him--our little
Leloo."

So he grew from babyhood into boyhood with a love for the furry-coated
wild creatures that prowled along the timber line, and their voices were
to him the voices of friends who had sung him to sleep ever since he
could remember anything.

But the night of his famous ride up the Cariboo Trail where it skirts
the Bonaparte Hills proved to him how wise a thing it was that he had
long ago made friends, instead of foes, of the wolves, for if he had
feared them, it would have been a ride of terror instead of triumph, as
it was his love for them that helped him to do a great, heroic thing
which made the very name "Leloo" beloved by every man, both white and
Indian, in all the Lillooet country.

It was one day early in the autumn that Leloo's father sent him down the
trail some ten or fifteen miles with a message to the "boss" of the
great railway construction camp that the Lillooet Indians would supply
fifty men to work on the Company's roadway. So the boy mounted his pet
cayuse and started off early, swinging down the mountain trails into the
canyons, then climbing again across the summit, with its dense growth of
timber. His little legs were almost too short to grip his horse's middle
as his father could have done, so he went more slowly and carefully over
the dangerous places, marking every one in his mind, in case he was late
in returning. When he reached the camp the "boss" was absent, and,
Indian-like, he would deliver his message to no one else except the man
it was intended for, and when the "boss" returned at supper time from
far down the grade, he insisted upon Leloo sharing his pork and beans
and drinking great quantities of tea.

"Better stay all night, youngster," said the boss kindly; "It's a long
ride back, and it's going to be dark."

"No stay to-night," answered Leloo. "Maybe some time I stay, but no
to-night."

"Well, you know best, kid," replied the boss. "There's one thing--no
harm will ever come to an Indian boy on a mountain trail. But be
careful; the canyons are deep, and the trail is bad in spots."

"Me know, me careful," smiled Leloo, and mounting his cayuse, trotted
off gayly, just as the sun was lost behind a grim, rocky peak in the
west. But the "boss" was right: night comes quickly in the mountains,
and this night was unusually dark. Leloo had to ride very slowly, for
the narrow trail was a mere ledge carved out from the perpendicular
walls of the cliffs, which arose on the left, a sheer precipice hundreds
of feet above him, and fell away to the right in a yawning chasm, black,
and deep and unexplored. But the sure-footed cayuse stepped gingerly and
knowingly, neither halting nor stumbling, and his wise little rider let
the animal pick its own way, knowing well that a horse's senses in the
dark are more acute than a human's. Presently from far across the canyon
arose a weird, prolonged howl. Then from the heights above came an
answering one.

"Ah, my brothers!" called Leloo aloud. "You have come to greet me
through the night," and his eyes lighted like twin black fires, for he
loved these wolves that made their dens and lairs along the Cariboo
Trail, and to-night they were to serve him in the oddest fashion that a
wild animal was ever called upon to do. As he rode on, he would--just
for company's sake--call back to the wolves, answering their cries with
such a perfect imitation of their wild voices that they would reply to
him, from far below, then again from far above, and Leloo would smile
to himself and say, "That is right, O great and fierce Leloos; answer
me, for you are my kin and my cousins."

But the trail was growing steeper, narrower every moment, and after a
time Leloo forgot to reply to his forest friends, and just rode on,
peering through the shadows to avoid the dangers on all sides. Presently
a sound that belonged to neither crag nor canyon fell across his quick,
Indian ears. It was a man's voice, hushed, subdued, speaking very low,
and speaking in English. It said:

"I hear a horse coming."

"Shut up! Don't talk so loud," replied another voice.

"I tell you I hear horses," answered the first voice irritably. "It must
be the stage coming. Get ready!"

"You're clean crazy," said the other voice. "The stage makes more
noise than that, and I know for sure there's no horseman up the trail
to-night. It's some wild animal you hear."

Leloo pulled his cayuse stock still. He did not understand English
readily, he was not versed in the ways of the white man, but his
wonderful native wit and instinct told him at once that there was
something wrong--the wrong things that white men were sent to jail for
sometimes. He asked himself, "Why should they hide and whisper?" Only
hunters hid and refused to speak aloud. Then he remembered--the stage.

How often his father had talked of the great lumps of gold the white men
were digging up, two hundred miles north, up the Frozen River--"Cariboo
gold," his father had called it, and said that it was sent down in
numberless bags to "the front," and the stage brought it. And his father
would always finish the tale with, "The white men will risk their lives
and kill each other for this gold."

Leloo could never understand it, for he would much rather have a soft
wolf skin to lie on, a string of blue Hudson's Bay beads around his dark
throat, and fine, beaded moccasins, than all the gold in the world. But
while he sat stock still, the voices continued:

"There, it's stopped. I knew it was an animal. The stage won't be along
for an hour yet."

"They are white men, but the gold does not belong to them," Leloo told
himself. "It belongs to the white men on the stage, or up in the
Barkerville gold ledges. These white men here are 'bad medicine.' They
shall not find that stage."

But even as he thought it out, the voices began afresh.

"There's something wrong with my gun," said one, "it won't work."

"There's nothing wrong with _mine_," came the sneering reply. "_Mine_
will work all right. I'm going to have that gold."

"How much did Jim Orton say there was a-coming down on the stage?"
whispered the other.

"Some twenty thousand dollars' worth of nuggets," was the answer. "And
you'll use your gun, too, to get it, if you don't turn coward."

Then there was silence. So his father was right. These white men would
kill each other for gold--gold that belonged to another, to the men who
were working day and night for it up at the ledges, two hundred miles
north. Instantly Leloo's plan was formed. He would save the gold for the
men who owned it; save the good stage driver from the bullets of these
hiding, whispering sneaks and robbers. But how was he to do it? How
could he dare to move a step unless to turn backward? Twenty yards ahead
of him the two men crouched. Even by their lowered voices he could
locate them as hiding behind a giant boulder, some ten feet above the
trail. If he was to advance to meet the stage and warn the driver,
he needs must pass under their very feet. Was it quite impossible to
daringly gallop under their guns and be lost in the darkness before they
could recover from their surprise? Leloo could trust his cayuse, he
knew. The honest little creature was at this moment standing still as
the silence about them. Then acutely across that silence cut the long
wail of a lonely wolf wandering across the heights. A very inspiration
seized Leloo. In a second he had flung back his head, and from his thin,
Indian boyish lips there issued a weird, prolonged howl. He was
answering the wolf in his own language.

"Great guns!" ejaculated one of the highwaymen, "that wolf's right under
our feet. There he goes now. I hear him prowling past." For with the
howl, Leloo had started his cayuse gently, and the wise creature was
slipping beneath the dreaded boulder almost noiselessly. The boy fairly
held his breath. Suppose they should peer through the dark, and see that
it was a horse and rider, and no wild animal padding up the trail? Then
his wolf friend from the heights answered him, and Leloo once more
lifted his head, and the strange half-barking, half-sobbing cry again
broke the silence. He was well past the boulder now, ten, twenty, thirty
yards, when his innocent little cayuse gave that peculiar snort which a
horse always gives when some sudden fear or danger threatens. The
animal's instinct had evidently detected the presence of enemies.

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