Listen to a case in point. A friend of mine with a faculty for getting into and out of places the most tight and remote, once found himself for a whole month dependent upon the hospitality of an African tribe so degraded as to have lost (if it had ever possessed) the art of hut-building. These simple aborigines erected little shelters of small brushwood to windward and slept thereunder. They wore no garments, not even the most exiguous. A rough man, a coarse man, in such company would have discerned nothing but the brutality which he brought with him. He would have mishandled the situation from the first, and, having presently reduced his position to an impossibility, would have taken himself off and returned (with luck) to civilisation with a story of beastly savages, less than half human, no better than the dog-faced baboons of the cliffs.
Not so my friend, who, being an English gentleman of the best type, had no difficulty in adapting himself to the necessities of a novel situation. He took to his hosts, they reciprocated, and he enjoyed the unique opportunity of being admitted to the inner life of a singular and interesting community. He watched and remembered. Among other matters he observed that the ladies of this little people had several of the habits, mannerisms and small personal traits of their sisters in good society.
Back to my tale. One of the little ways of mothers-in-law, even of mothers-in-law of family, is to assume a large degree of ignorance upon the part of the bride, and to gently (but firmly) initiate her into the right ways of doing things, and the relative positions and status of the persons of her new circle. I put it diplomatically. I have not used the word "encroach"; I have known a bride return from her honeymoon to find all her bridecake cut up and distributed.
But, conceive the claims of a grandmother-in-law, who was also head-wife of the chief-regnant, a woman of advanced years, of the firmest character, and not unaccustomed to implicit obedience.
This old lady was a rather terrible old lady, and no fool. She detected a Little Moon woman at a glance, as she was likely to do, being a Little Moon woman herself who had come over the pass forty years before with her elbows shackled and a bruise upon the top of her head as big as a fresh-water mussel. Hence a woman of the clan into which she had been born was a quite unmysterious creature, about which she had, as she conceived, nothing to learn. She was for undertaking the usual breaking-in forthwith.
But her grandson Pŭl-Yūn would have none of it. Mildly, but with absolute decision, he postponed the business. "No, my wife shall sit in my presence,—yes, at my desire. Also, she shall eat with me. It is unusual, I admit, but such is Our Rule. You do not understand?—That too, I admit. I am hoping to make things plain presently, but we must start fair, start as we mean to go on. In one word my wife is a Very Great Medicine. I have brought her a long way through deep snow, she is tired. I do not wish her to stand any more to-night, nor answer questions. To-morrow, perhaps. In the meantime, feel this—" the man extended his leg. "It was broken, as thou canst feel—she—my wife there, mended it. I lay more than a whole moon in her hands. She found me so; she left her tribe to come to me; she made me a sound man, as thou canst see. It was great medicine."
"It was great medicine," murmured the old chief, critically fingering the reunited bone. The eyes of the head wife snapped; seldom did a broken leg come so straight as this, but, she would admit nothing. Pŭl-Yūn was speaking.
"That was once, but she has saved my life three times since in battle. I say it. Do not ask how to-night. Yes, this is a bear-skin, the pelt of a very great Man-bear. A Cave Grizzly. I have never seen a greater, but I have seen but few. Possibly my chief, who has seen and handled several bears, has seen a greater Man-bear than this?"
The old chief watched the unrolling of the huge skin and shook his head; no, he had never seen one as wide or so long: it was immense: a winter coat, too, it was the finest skin he had ever handled.