to tire, and laid down his elk-horn spade to wipe the sweat from his
brow. Straightway the fugleman otter turned, and, swinging his tail,
gave the weary man a mighty thump on the shoulder; and the whole band,
imitating, turned, and, backing inward, smote him with centripetal
tails, until he resumed his labors, much bruised.
"The rock lay first in plates, then in scales. These it was easy to
remove. Presently, however, as the miser pried carelessly at a larger
mass, he broke his elkhorn tool. Fugleman otter leaped down, and
seizing the supplemental pick between his teeth, mouthed it over to
the digger. Then the amphibious monster took in the same manner the
broken pick, and bore it round the circle of his suite, who inspected
it gravely with puffs.
"These strange, magical proceedings disconcerted and somewhat baffled
the miser; but he plucked up heart, for the prize was priceless, and
worked on more cautiously with his second pick. At last its blows and
the regular thumps of the otter's tails called forth a sound hollower
and hollower. His circle of spectators narrowed so that he could feel
their panting breath as they bent curiously over the little pit he had
dug.
"The crisis was evidently at hand.
"He lifted each scale of rock more delicately. Finally he raised a
scale so thin that it cracked into flakes as he turned it over.
Beneath was a large square cavity.
"It was filled to the brim with hiaqua.
"He was a millionnaire.
"The otters recognized him as the favorite of Tamanoüs, and retired to
a respectful distance.
"For some moments he gazed on his treasure, taking thought of his
future proud grandeur among the dwellers by Whulge. He plunged his arm
deep as he could go; there was still nothing but the precious shells.
He smiled to himself in triumph; he had wrung the secret from
Tamanoüs. Then, as he withdrew his arm, the rattle of the hiaqua
recalled him to the present. He saw that noon was long past, and he
must proceed to reduce his property to possession.
"The hiaqua was strung upon long, stout sinews of elk, in bunches of
fifty shells on each side. Four of these he wound about his waist;
three he hung across each shoulder; five he took in each hand;--twenty
strings of pure white hiaqua, every shell large, smooth, unbroken,
beautiful. He could carry no more; hardly even with this could he
stagger along. He put down his burden for a moment, while he covered
up the seemingly untouched wealth of the deposit carefully with the
scale stones, and brushed snow over the whole.
"The miser never dreamed of gratitude, never thought to hang a string
from the buried treasure about the salmon and kamas tamanoüs stones,
and two strings around the elk's head; no, all must be his own, all he
could carry now, and the rest for the future.
"He turned, and began his climb toward the crater's edge. At once the
otters, with a mighty puff in concert, took up their line of
procession, and, plunging into the black lake, began to beat the water
with their tails.
"The miser could hear the sound of splashing water as he struggled
upward through the snow, now melted and yielding. It was a long hour
of harsh toil and much backsliding before he reached the rim, and
turned to take one more view of this valley of good fortune.
"As he looked, a thick mist began to rise from the lake centre, where
the otters were splashing. Under the mist grew a cylinder of black
cloud, utterly hiding the water.
"Terrible are storms in the mountains; but in this looming mass was a
terror more dread than any hurricane of ruin ever bore within its wild
vortexes. Tamanoüs was in that black cylinder, and as it strode
forward, chasing in the very path of the miser, he shuddered, for his
wealth and his life were in danger.
"However, it might be but a common storm. Sunlight was bright as ever
overhead in heaven, and all the lovely world below lay dreamily fair,
in that afternoon of summer, at the feet of the rich man, who now was
hastening to be its king. He stepped from the crater edge and began
his descent.
"Instantly the storm overtook him. He was thrown down by its first
assault, flung over a rough bank of iciness, and lay at the foot torn
and bleeding, but clinging still to his precious burden. Each hand
still held its five strings of hiaqua. In each hand he bore a nation's
ransom. He staggered to his feet against the blast. Utter night was
around him,--night as if daylight had forever perished, had never come
into being from chaos. The roaring of the storm had also deafened and
bewildered him with its wild uproar.
"Present in every crash and thunder of the gale was a growing
undertone, which the miser well knew to be the voice of Tamanoüs. A
deadly shuddering shook him. Heretofore that potent Unseen had been
his friend and guide; there had been awe, but no terror, in his words.
Now the voice of Tamanoüs was inarticulate, but the miser could divine
in that sound an unspeakable threat of wrath and vengeance. Floating
upon this undertone were sharper tamanoüs voices, shouting and
screaming always sneeringly, 'Ha, ha, hiaqua!--ha, ha, ha!'
"Whenever the miser essayed to move and continue his descent, a
whirlwind caught him, and with much ado tossed him hither and thither,
leaving him at last flung and imprisoned in a pinching crevice, or
buried to the eyes in a snowdrift, or bedded upside down on a shaggy
boulder, or gnawed by lacerating lava jaws. Sharp torture the old man
was encountering, but he held fast to his hiaqua.
"The blackness grew ever deeper and more crowded with perdition; the
din more impish, demoniac, and devilish; the laughter more appalling;
and the miser more and more exhausted with vain buffeting. He
determined to propitiate exasperated Tamanoüs with a sacrifice. He
threw into the black cylinder storm his left-handful, five strings of
precious hiaqua."
"Somewhat long-winded is thy legend, Hamitchou, Great Medicine-Man of
the Squallyamish," quoth I. "Why didn't the old fool drop his
wampum,--shell out, as one might say,--and make tracks?"
"Well, well!" continued Hamitchou; "when the miser had thrown away his
first handful of hiaqua, there was a momentary lull in elemental war,
and he heard the otters puffing around him invisible. Then the storm
renewed, blacker, louder, harsher, crueller than before, and over the
dread undertone of the voice of Tamanoüs, tamanoüs voices again
screamed, 'Ha, ha, ha, hiaqua!' and it seemed as if tamanoüs hands, or
the paws of the demon otters, clutched at the miser's right-handful
and tore at his shoulder and waist belts.
"So, while darkness and tempest still buffeted the hapless old man,
and thrust him away from his path, and while the roaring was wickeder
than the roars of tens and tens of tens of bears when ahungered they
pounce upon a plain of kamas, gradually wounded and terrified he flung
away string after string of hiaqua, gaining never any notice of such
sacrifice, except an instant's lull of the cyclone and a puff from the
invisible otters.
"The last string he clung to long, and before he threw it to be caught
and whirled after its fellows, he tore off a single bunch of fifty
shells. But upon this, too, the storm laid its clutches. In the final
desperate struggle the old man was wounded so sternly that when he
had given up his last relic of the mighty treasure, when he had thrown
into the formless chaos, instinct with Tamanoüs, his last propitiatory
offering, he sank and became insensible.
"It seemed a long slumber to him, but at last he awoke. The jagged
moon was just paling overhead, and he heard Skai-ki, the Blue-Jay, foe
to magic, singing welcome to sunrise. It was the very spot whence he
started at morning.
"He was hungry, and felt for his bag of kamas and pouch of
smokeleaves. There, indeed, by his side were the elk-sinew strings of
the bag, and the black stone pipe-bowl,--but no bag, no kamas, no
kinni kinnik. The whole spot was thick with kamas plants, strangely
out of place on the mountain-side, and overhead grew a large
arbutus-tree, with glistening leaves, ripe for smoking. The old man
found his hardwood fire-sticks safe under the herbage, and soon
twirled a light, and, nurturing it in dry grass, kindled a cheery
fire. He plucked up kamas, set it to roast, and laid a store of the
arbutus-leaves to dry on a flat stone.
"After he had made a hearty breakfast of the chestnut-like
kamas-bulbs, and, smoking the thoughtful pipe, was reflecting on the
events of yesterday, he became aware of an odd change in his
condition. He was not bruised and wounded from head to foot, as he
expected, but very stiff only, and as he stirred, his joints creaked
like the creak of a lazy paddle upon the rim of a canoe. Skai-ki, the
Blue-Jay, was singularly familiar with him, hopping from her perch in
the arbutus, and alighting on his head. As he put his hand to dislodge
her, he touched his scratching-stick of bone, and attempted to pass
it, as usual, through his hair. The hair was matted and interlaced
into a network reaching fully two ells down his back. 'Tamanoüs,'
thought the old man.
"Chiefly he was conscious of a mental change. He was calm and
content. Hiaqua and wealth seemed to have lost their charms for him.
Tacoma, shining like gold and silver and precious stones of gayest
lustre, seemed a benign comrade and friend. All the outer world was
cheerful and satisfying. He thought he had never awakened to a fresher
morning. He was a young man again, except for that unusual stiffness
and unmelodious creaking joints. He felt no apprehension of any
presence of a deputy tamanoüs, sent by Tamanoüs to do malignities upon
him in the lonely wood. Great Nature had a kindly aspect, and made its
divinity perceived only by the sweet notes of birds and the hum of
forest life, and by a joy that clothed his being. And now he found in
his heart a sympathy for man, and a longing to meet his old
acquaintances down by the shores of Whulge.
"He rose, and started on the downward way, smiling, and sometimes
laughing heartily at the strange croaking, moaning, cracking, and
rasping of his joints. But soon motion set the lubricating valves at
work, and the sockets grew slippery again. He marched rapidly,
hastening out of loneliness into society. The world of wood, glade,
and stream seemed to him strangely altered. Old colossal trees, firs
behind which he had hidden when on the hunt, cedars under whose
drooping shade he had lurked, were down, and lay athwart his path,
transformed into immense mossy mounds, like barrows of giants, over
which he must clamber warily, lest he sink and be half stifled in the
dust of rotten wood. Had Tamanoüs been widely at work in that eventful
night?--or had the spiritual change the old man felt affected his
views of the outer world?
"Travelling downward, he advanced rapidly, and just before sunset came
to the prairies where his lodge should be. Everything had seemed to
him so totally altered, that he tarried a moment in the edge of the
woods to take an observation before approaching his home. There was a
lodge, indeed, in the old spot, but a newer and far handsomer one
than he had left on the fourth evening before.
"A very decrepit old squaw, ablaze with vermilion and decked with
countless strings of hiaqua and costly beads, was seated on the ground
near the door, tending a kettle of salmon, whose blue and fragrant
steam mingled pleasantly with the golden haze of sunset. She resembled
his own squaw in countenance, as an ancient smoked salmon is like a
newly-dried salmon. If she was indeed his spouse, she was many years
older than when he saw her last, and much better dressed than the
respectable lady had ever been during his miserly days.
"He drew near quietly. The bedizened dame was crooning a chant, very
dolorous,--like this:
'My old man has gone, gone, gone,--
My old man to Tacoma, has gone.
To hunt the elk, he went long ago.
When will he come down, down, down,
Down to the salmon-pot and me?'
'He has come from Tacoma down, down, down,--
Down to the salmon-pot and thee,'
shouted the reformed miser, rushing forward to supper and his faithful
wife."
"And how did Penelope explain the mystery?" I asked.
"If you mean the old lady," replied Hamitchou, "she was my
grandmother, and I'd thank you not to call names. She told my
grandfather that he had been gone many years;--she could not tell how
many, having dropped her tally-stick in the fire by accident that very
day. She also told him how, in despite of the entreaties of many a
chief who knew her economic virtues, and prayed her to become mistress
of his household, she had remained constant to the Absent, and forever
kept the hopeful salmon-pot boiling for his return. She had distracted
her mind from the bitterness of sorrow by trading in kamas and magic
herbs, and had thus acquired a genteel competence. The excellent dame
then exhibited with great complacency her gains, most of which she had
put in the portable and secure form of personal ornament, making
herself a resplendent magazine of valuable frippery.
"Little cared the repentant sage for such things. But he was rejoiced
to be again at home and at peace, and near his own early gains of
hiaqua and treasure, buried in a place of security. These, however, he
no longer over-esteemed and hoarded. He imparted whatever he
possessed, material treasures or stores of wisdom and experience,
freely to all the land. Every dweller by Whulge came to him for advice
how to chase the elk, how to troll or spear the salmon, and how to
propitiate Tamanoüs. He became the Great Medicine Man of the siwashes,
a benefactor to his tribe and his race.
"Within a year after he came down from his long nap on the side of
Tacoma, a child, my father, was born to him. The sage lived many
years, beloved and revered, and on his deathbed, long before the
Boston tilicum or any blanketeers were seen in the regions of Whulge,
he told this history to my father, as a lesson and a warning. My
father, dying, told it to me. But I, alas! have no son; I grow old,
and lest this wisdom perish from the earth, and Tamanoüs be again
obliged to interpose against avarice, I tell the tale to thee, O
Boston tyee. Mayest thou and thy nation not disdain this lesson of an
earlier age, but profit by it and be wise."
So far Hamitchou recounted his legend without the palisades of Fort
Nisqually, and motioning, in expressive pantomime, at the close, that
he was dry with big talk, and would gladly wet his whistle.
[Chapter VIII, beginning at page 155 of the original
publication, is entitled: "Sowee House--Loolowcan."]
I had not long, that noon of August, from the top of La Tête, to study
Tacoma, scene of Hamitchou's wild legend. Humanity forbade dalliance.
While I fed my soul with sublimity, Klale and his comrades were
wretched with starvation. But the summit of the pass is near. A few
struggles more, Klale the plucky, and thy empty sides shall echo less
drum-like. Up stoutly, my steeds; up a steep but little less than
perpendicular, paw over these last trunks of the barricades in our
trail, and ye have won!
So it was. The angle of our ascent suddenly broke down from ninety to
fifteen, then to nothing. We had reached the plateau. Here were the
first prairies. Nibble in these, my nags, for a few refreshing
moments, and then on to superlative dinners in lovelier spots just
beyond.
Let no one, exaggerating the joys of campaigning, with Horace's
"Militia potior est," deem that there is no compensating pang among
them. Is it a pleasant thing, O traveller only in dreams, envier of
the voyager in reality, to urge tired, reluctant, and unfed mustangs
up a mountain pass, even for their own good? In such a case a man, the
humanest and gentlest, must adopt the manners of a brute. He must ply
the whip, and that cruelly; otherwise, no go. At first, as he smites,
he winces, for he has struck his own sensibilities; by and by he
hardens himself, and thrashes without a tremor. When the cortege
arrives at an edible prairie, gastronomic satisfaction will put
Lethean freshness in the battered hide of every horse.
We presently turned just aside from the trail into an episode of
beautiful prairie, one of a succession along the plateau at the crest
of the range. At this height of about five thousand feet, the snows
remain until June. In this fair, oval, forest-circled prairie of my
nooning, the grass was long and succulent, as if it grew in the bed of
a drained lake. The horses, undressed, were allowed to plunge and
wallow in the deep herbage. Only horse heads soon could be seen,
moving about like their brother hippopotami, swimming in sedges.
To me it was luxury enough not to be a whip for a time. Over and above
this, I had the charm of a quiet nooning on a bank of emerald turf, by
a spring, at the edge of a clump of evergreens. I took my luncheon of
cold salt pork and doughy biscuit by a well of brightest water. I
called in no proxy of tin cup to aid me in saluting this sparkling
creature, but stooped and kissed the spring. When I had rendered my
first homage thus to the goddess of the fountain, Ægle herself,
perhaps, fairest of Naiads, I drank thirstily of the medium in which
she dwelt. A bubbling dash of water leaped up and splashed my visage
as I withdrew. Why so, sweet fountain, which I may name Hippocrene,
since hoofs of Klale have caused me thy discovery? Is this a rebuff?
If there ever was lover who little merited such treatment it is I.
"Not so, appreciative stranger," came up in other bubbling gushes the
responsive voice of Nature through sweet vibrations of the melodious
fount. "Never a Nymph of mine will thrust thee back. This sudden leap
of water was a movement of sympathy, and a gentle emotion of
hospitality. The Naiad there was offering thee her treasure liberally,
and saying that, drink as thou wilt, I, her mother Nature, have
commanded my winds and sun to distil thee fresh supplies, and my
craggy crevices are filtering it in the store-houses, that it may be
offered to every welcome guest, pure and cool as airs of dawn. Stoop
down," continued the voice, "thirsty wayfarer, and kiss again my
daughter of the fountain, nor be abashed if she meets thee half-way.
She knows that a true lover will never scorn his love's delicate
advances."
In response to such invitation, and the more for my thirsty slices of
pork, I lapped the aerated tipple in its goblet, whose stem reaches
deep into the bubble laboratories. I lapped,--an excellent test of
pluck in the days of Gideon son of Barak;--and why? For many reasons,
but among them for this;--he who lying prone can with stout muscular
gullet swallow water, will be also able to swallow back into position
his heart, when in moments of tremor it leaps into his throat.
When I had lapped plenteously, I lay and let the breeze-shaken shadows
smooth me into smiling mood, while my sympathies overflowed to enjoy
with my horses their dinner. They fed like school-boys home for
Thanksgiving, in haste lest the present banquet, too good to be true,
prove Barmecide. A feast of colossal grasses placed itself at the lips
of the breakfastless stud. They champed as their nature was;--Klale
like a hungry gentleman,--Gubbins like a hungry clodhopper,--Antipodes
like a lubberly oaf. They were laying in, according to the Hudson's
Bay Company's rule, supply at this meal for five days; without such
power, neither man nor horse is fit to tramp the Northwest.
I lay on the beautiful verdant bank, plucking now dextrously and now
sinistrously of strawberries, that summer, climbing late to these
snowy heights, had just ripened. Medical men command us to swallow
twice a day one bitter pill confectioned of all disgust. Nature doses
us, by no means against our will, with many sweet boluses of delight,
berries compacted of acidulated, sugary spiciness. Nature, tenderest
of leeches,--no bolus of hers is pleasanter medicament than her ruddy
strawberries. She shaped them like Minié-balls, that they might
traverse unerringly to the cell of most dulcet digestion. Over their
glistening surfaces she peppered little golden dots to act as
obstacles lest they should glide too fleetly over the surfaces of
taste, and also to gently rasp them into keener sensitiveness. Mongers
of pestled poisons may punch their pills in malodorous mortars, roll
them in floury palms, pack them in pink boxes, and send them forth to
distress a world of patients:--but Nature, who if she even feels one's
pulse does it by a gentle pressure of atmosphere,--Nature, knowing
that her children in their travels always need lively tonics, tells
wind, sun, and dew, servitors of hers, clean and fine of touch, to
manipulate gay strawberries, and dispose them attractively on fair
green terraces, shaded at parching noon. Of these lovely fabrics of
pithy pulpiness, no limit to the dose, if the invalid does as Nature
intended, and plucks for himself, with fingers rosy and fragrant. I
plucked of them, as far as I could reach on either side of me, and
then lay drowsily reposing on my couch at the summit of the Cascade
Pass, under the shade of a fir, which, outstanding from the forest,
had changed its columnar structure into a pyramidal, and had branches
all along its stalwart trunk, instead of a mere tuft at the top.
In this shade I should have known the tree which gave it, without
looking up,--not because the sharp little spicular leaves of the fir,
miniatures of that sword Rome used to open the world, its oyster,
would drop and plunge themselves into my eyes, or would insert their
blades down my back and scarify,--but because there is an influence
and sentiment in umbrages, and under every tree its own atmosphere.
Elms refine and have a graceful elegiac effect upon those they
shelter. Oaks drop robustness. Mimosas will presently make a
sensitive-plant of him who hangs his hammock beneath their shade.
Cocoa-palms will infect him with such tropical indolence, that he will
not stir until frowzy monkeys climb the tree and pelt him away to the
next one. The shade of pine-trees, as any one can prove by a journey
in Maine, makes those who undergo it wiry, keen, trenchant,
inexhaustible, and tough.
When I had felt the influence of my fir shelter, on the edge of the
wayside prairie, long enough, I became of course keen as a blade. I
sprang up and called to Loolowcan, in a resinous voice, "Mamook chaco
cuitan; make come horse."
Loolowcan, in more genial mood than I had known him, drove the trio
out from the long grass. They came forth not with backward hankerings,
but far happier quadrupeds than when they climbed the pass at noon. It
was a pleasure now to compress with the knees Klale, transformed from
an empty barrel with protuberant hoops, into a full elastic cylinder,
smooth as the boiler of a locomotive.
"Loolowcan, my lad, my experienced guide, cur nesika moosum; where
sleep we?" said I.
"Copa Sowee house,--kicuali. Sowee, olyman tyee,--memloose. Sia-a-ah
mitlite;--At Sowee's camp--below. Sowee, oldman chief,--dead. It is
far, far away," replied the son of Owhhigh.
Far is near, distance is annihilated this brilliant day of summer, for
us recreated with Hippocrene, strawberries, shade of fir and tall
snow-fed grass. Down the mountain range seems nothing after our long
laborious up; "the half is more than the whole." "Lead on, Loolowcan,
intelligent brave, toward the residence of the late Sowee."