The Shagganappi Part 10

The contents of that tepee would have brought thousands of dollars in New York City.

Across Norton's mind there flashed the recollection of the pa.s.senger offering his paltry two dollars to Sleeping Thunder for the eagle plume in his hair. No wonder the train conductor had laughed! And just here North Eagle entered, asking him if he would care to see the cattle that were ranging somewhere near by. Of course he cared, and for all the years to come he never forgot that sight. For a mile beyond him the landscape seemed blotted out by a sea of gleaming horns and shifting hoofs--a moving ma.s.s that seemed to swim into the sky. It was a great possession--a herd like that--and Norton found himself marvelling at the strange fact that he and his parents, travelling in luxurious Pullmans, and living in a great city, were poor in comparison with this slender Blackfoot boy who was acting host with the grace that comes only with perfect freedom and simplicity.

The day was very warm, so supper was prepared outside the tepee, North Eagle showing Tony how to build a fire in a prairie wind, lee of the tepee, and midway between two upright poles supporting a cross-bar from which the kettles hung. Boiled beef, strong black tea, and bannock, were the main foods, but out of compliment to their visitor, they fried a quant.i.ty of delicious mushrooms, and, although the Blackfeet seldom eat them, Tony fairly devoured several helpings. After supper North Eagle took him again into the tepee, and showed him all the wonderful buckskin garments and ornaments. Tony was speechless with the delight of it all, and even begrudged the hours wherein he must sleep; but the unusual length of the ride, the clear air, and the hearty supper he had eaten, all began to tell on his excitement, and he was quite ready to "turn in"

with the others shortly after sunset.

"Turning in" meant undressing, folding a Hudson's Bay blanket about him, and lying near the open flap of the tepee, on a heap of wolf skins as soft as feathers and as silvery as a cloud.

Night crept up over the prairie like a grey veil, and the late moon, rising, touched the far level wastes with a pale radiance. Through the open flap of the tepee Tony watched it--the majestic loneliness and isolation, the hushed silence of this prairie world were very marvellous--and he loved it almost as if it were his birthright, instead of the heritage of the Blackfoot boy sleeping beside him. Then across the white night came the cry of a wandering coyote, and once the whirr of many wings swept overhead. Then his wolfskin couch grew very soft and warm, the night airs very gentle, the silence very drowsy, and Tony slept.

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 b.u.t.toned 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 ma.s.sed 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 G.o.d," she murmured, "except that He is good, but I know that the Great Tyee (G.o.d) 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 G.o.d 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?"