“One time in midwinter his wife had a terrible longing for green corn, and she told him. He went to the fireplace, rolled up some strips of bark, laid them in the ashes, and began to sing a low song. After a while he told her to go and get her corn, and there lay the ears all nicely roasted. He used to make quarters, too. He would cut little round bits of paper, put them to his mouth, breathe on them, then lay them down and cover them with his hand. By and by he would lift his hand with a silver quarter in it.” I remarked that he ought to have been a rich man; but Louisa said, “Oh, he didn’t make many, just a few now and then. When he was out hunting in the woods with a party and the tobacco gave out, they would see him fussing round after they went to bed, and then he would hand out a big cake of tobacco.”
Louisa said several times, as if she thought me incredulous, “This is a true story; the old lady told me about the corn herself, and she was the mother of my brother Joe Nicola’s wife. She was a witch, too.”
I asked Louisa when and how the Indians learned to make baskets and she said they always knew. When Glūs-kābé went away, he told the ash-tree and the birch that they must provide for his children; and so they always had, by furnishing the stuff for baskets and canoes.
K’CHĪ GESS’N, THE NORTHWEST WIND
When he was a baby he was stolen by “Pūkjinsquess,”[14] and taken to a far-off lonely country inhabited by invisible people. His first recollection was of lying under the “k’chīquelsowe mūsikūk,” or frog-bushes.[15]
He rose, and, seeing a path, followed it until he reached a wigwam. When he lifted the door, he saw no one, but heard a voice say: “Come in, ‘nītāp.’ ”[16]
He went in, and the voice said: “If you will be friends with me, I will be friends with you, and help you in the future.”
He looked about him, but saw nothing but a little stone pipe. He picked it up, and put it in his bosom, saying: “This must be the one who spoke to me.”
Then he went out and followed the path still farther. He heard the cry of a baby, so he hid behind a tree. The sound came nearer. Soon he saw a hideous old woman with a baby on her back, which she was beating. This roused his temper, and he shot her with his bow and arrow. She proved to be Pūkjinsquess, and the baby was his brother, whom she had stolen from his father, the great East Wind.
He put the baby in his bosom, and kept on his way. The baby said to him: “There is a camp ahead of us, but you must not go in, for the people are bad.”