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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 possession—“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 north-western 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 travelers 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. [Page
81]
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. [Page
82] “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.
[Page 83]
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, gray 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 gray 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 hesistated,
“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 gray 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
[Page 84] 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 [Page
85] 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 northwest 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 gray 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,
he 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, [Page 86] 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.”
[Page 87]
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