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one could possibly mistake the quiet little tap at the
door. It could be given by no other hand west of the
Rockies save that of my old friend The Klootchman. I
dropped a lap full of work and sprang to open the door;
for the slanting rains were chill outside, albeit the
December grass was green and the great masses of English
ivy clung wet and fresh as in summer about the low stone
wall that ran between my verandah and the street.
“Kla-how-ya, Tillicum,”
I greeted, dragging her into the warmth and comfort
of my “den,” and relieving her of her inseparable
basket, and removing her rain-soaked shawl. Before she
spoke she gave that peculiar gesture common to the Indian
woman from the Atlantic to the Pacific. She lifted both
hands and with each forefinger smoothed gently along
her forehead from the parting of her hair to the temples.
It is the universal habit of the red woman, and simply
means a desire for neatness in her front locks.
I busied myself immediately
with the teakettle, for, like all her kind, The Klootchman
dearly [Page 178] loves her tea.
The old woman’s eyes sparkled
as she watched the welcome brewing, while she chatted
away in half English, half Chinook, telling me of her
doings in all these weeks that I had not seen her. But
it was when I handed her a huge old-fashioned breakfast
cup fairly brimming with tea as strong as lye that she
really described her journeyings.
She had been north to the Skeena
River, south to the great “Fair” at Seattle,
but, best of all seemingly to her, was her trip into
the interior. She had been up the trail to Lillooet
in the great “Cariboo” country. It was my
turn then to have sparkling eyes, for I traversed that
inexpressibly beautiful trail five years ago, and the
delight of that journey will remain with me for all
time.
“And, oh! Tillicum,”
I cried, “have your good brown ears actually listened
to the call of the falls across the cañon—the
Falls of Lillooet?”
“My ears have heard them
whisper, laugh, weep,” she replied in the Chinook.
“Yes,” I answered,
“they do all those things. They have magic voices—those
dear, far-off falls!”
At the word “magic”
her keen eyes snapped, she set her empty cup aside and
looked at me solemnly.
“Then you know the story—the
strange tale?” she asked almost whisperingly.
[Page 179]
I shook my head. This was always
the crucial moment with my Klootchman, when her voice
lowers, and she asks if you know things. You must be
diplomatic, and never question her in turn. If you do
her lips will close in unbreakable silence.
“I have heard no story,
but I have heard the Falls ‘whisper, laugh and
weep.’ That is enough for me,” I said, with
seeming indifference.
“What do you se when you
look at them from across the cañon?” she
asked. “Do they look to you like anything else
but falling water?”
I thought for a moment before
replying. Memory seemed to hold up an indistinct photograph
of towering fir-crested heights, where through a broken
ridge of rock a shower of silvery threads cascaded musically
down, down, down, until they lost themselves in the
mighty Fraser, that hurled itself through the yawning
cañon stretched at my feet. I have never seen
such slender threads of glowing tissue save on early
morning cobwebs at sun-up.
“The Falls look like cobwebs,”
I said, as the memory touched me. “Millions of
fine misty cobwebs woven together.”
“Then the legend must
be true,” she uttered, half to herself. I slipped
down on my treasured wolf-skin rug near her chair, and
with hands locked about my knees, sat in silence, knowing
it was the one and only way to lure her to speech. She
arose, helped herself to more tea, and with [Page
180] the toe of her beaded moccasin idly stroked
one of the wolf-skin paws. “Yes,” she said,
with some decision, “the Indian men of magic say
that the falls are cobwebs twisted and braided together.”
I nodded, but made no comment;
then her voice droned into the broken English, that,
much as I love it, I must leave to the reader’s
imagination. “Indian mothers are strange,”
she began. I nodded again.
“Yes, they are strange,
and there is a strange tie between them and their children.
The men of magic say they can see that tie, though you
and I cannot. It is thin, fine, silvery as a cobweb,
but strong as the ropes of wild vine that swing down
the great cañons. No storm ever breaks those
vines; the tempests that drag the giant firs and cedars
up by their roots, snap their branches and break their
boles, never break the creeping vines. They may be torn
from their strongholds, but in the young months of the
summer the vine will climb up, and cling again. Nothing
breaks it. So is the cobweb tie the Men of Magic see
between the Indian mother and her child.
“There was a time when
no falls leapt and sang down the heights at Lillooet,
and in those days our men were very wild and warlike;
but the women were gentle and very beautiful, and they
loved and lived and bore children as women have done
before, and since. [Page 181]
“But there was one, more
gentle, more beautiful than all others of the tribe.
‘Be-be,’ our people call her; it is the
Chinook word for ‘a kiss.’ None of our people
knew her real name; but it was a kiss of hers that made
this legend, so as ‘Be-be’ we speak of her.
“She was a mother-woman,
but save for one beautiful girl-child, her family of
six were all boys, splendid, brave boys, too, but this
one treasured girl-child they called “Morning-mist.’
She was little and frail and beautiful, like the clouds
one sees at daybreak circling around the mountain peaks.
Her father and her brothers loved her, but the heart
of Be-be, her mother, seemed wrapped round and about
that misty-eyed child.
“‘I love you,’
the mother would say many times a day, as she caught
the girl-child in her arms. ‘And I love you,’
the girl-child would answer, resting for a moment against
the warm shoulder. ‘Little Flower,’ the
woman would murmur, ‘thou art morning to me, thou
art golden mid-day, thou art slumbrous nightfall to
my heart.’
“So these two loved and
lived, mother and daughter, made for each other, shaped
into each other’s lives as the moccasin is shaped
to the foot.
“Then came that long,
shadowed, sunless day, when Be-be, returning from many
hours of ollallie picking, her basket filled to the
brim with rich fruit, her heart reaching forth to her
home even [Page 182] before her swift
feet could traverse the trail, found her husband and
her boys stunned with a dreadful fear, searching with
wild eyes, hurrying feet, and grief-wrung hearts for
her little ‘Morning-child,’ who had wandered
into the forest while her brothers played—the
forest which was deep and dark and dangerous,—and
had not returned.”
The Klootchman’s voice
ceased. For a long moment she gazed straight before
her, then looking at me said:
“You have heard the Falls
of Lillooet weep?” I nodded.
“It is the weeping of
that Indian mother, sobbing through the centuries, that
you hear.” She uttered the words with a cadence
of grief in her voice.
“Hours, nights, days,
they searched for the Morning-child,” she continued.
“And each moment of that unending agony to the
mother-woman is repeated to-day in the call, the wail,
the everlasting sobbing of the falls. At night the wolves
howled up the cañon. ‘God of my fathers,
keep safe my Morning-child,’ the mother would
implore. In the glare of day eagles poised, and vultures
wheeled above the forest, their hungry claws, their
unblinking eyes, their beaks of greed shining in the
sunlight. ‘God of my fathers, keep safe my Morning-child’
was again wrung from the mother’s lips. For one
long moon, that dawned, and shone and darkened, that
mother’s [Page 183] heart lived
out its torture. Then one pale daybreak a great fleet
of canoes came down the Fraser River. Those that paddled
were of a strange tribe, they spoke in a strange tongue,
but their hearts were human, and their skins were of
the rich copper-color of the Upper Lillooet country.
As they steered downstream, running the rapids, braving
the whirlpools, they chanted, in monotone:
“‘We
have a lost child,
A beautiful lost child.
We love this lost child,
But the heart of the child
Calls the mother of the child
Come and claim this lost child.’
“The
music of the chant was most beautiful, but no music
in the world of the white man’s Tyee could equal
that which rang through the heart of Be-be, the Indian
mother-woman.
“Heart upon heart, lips
upon lips, the Morning-child and the mother caught each
other in embrace. The strange tribe told of how they
had found the girl-child wandering fearfully in the
forest, crouching from the claws of eagles, shrinking
from the horror of wolves, but the mother with her regained
treasure in her arms begged them to cease their tales.
‘I have gone through agonies enough, oh, my friends,’
she cried aloud. ‘Let me rest from torture now.’
Then her people came and made a great feast and [Page
184] potlatch for this strange Upper Lillooet
tribe, and at the feast Be-be arose, and, lifting the
girl-child to her shoulder, she commanded silence and
spoke:
“‘O Sagalie Tyee
(God of all the earth), You have given back to me my
treasure; take my tears, my sobs, my happy laughter,
my joy—take the cobweb chains that bind my Morning-child
and me—make them sing to others, that they may
know my gratitude. O Sagalie Tyee, make them sing.’
As she spoke, she kissed the child. At that moment the
Falls of Lillooet came like a million cobweb strands,
dashing and gleaming down the cañon, sobbing,
laughing, weeping, calling, singing. You have listened
to them.”
The Klootchman’s voice
was still. Outside, the rains still slanted gently,
like a whispering echo of the far-away falls. “Thank
you, Tillicum of mine; it is a beautiful legend,”
I said. She did not reply until, wrapped about in her
shawl, she had clasped my hand in good-bye. At the door
she paused, “Yes,” she said—“and
it is true.” I smiled to myself. I love my Klootchman.
She is so very Indian. [Page 185]
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