Part 10 (2/2)

”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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 fis.h.i.+ng, 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 crus.h.i.+ng weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for flour-bread, no s.h.i.+vering 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?”

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