"The funeral canoes?" she echoed, wonderingly.
Kayak Bill turned to her with a sort of slow eagerness, as if he had been awaiting an excuse to look at her.
"Yas, Lady. They're a-bringin' in the ashes o' their dead kin from up in the Valley of the Kag-wan-tan."
Ellen's mind reverted to the many strange things she had heard during her short stay in Katleean, concerning the coming Potlatch of the Indians. This land and its people were new and mysterious to her. These primitive Thlingets, descendants of the fiercest and most intelligent of all the northern tribes were, withal, a fearful people living in a world of powerful and malignant spirits who frowned from the rocks, glittered from the cold, white mountains and glaciers, whispered in the trees and cackled derisively from the campfires; a world of hostile eyes spying upon them in the hope that some of their weird and mystic tabus might be broken, and of sly ears listening to avenge some careless remark. A childlike people they were, who spoke kindly to the winds and offered bits of fish for its favor; who begged the capricious sea to give them food, and who spent most of their lives working for the comfort of the dead—the Restless Ones—who sweep the winter skies when the day is done, beckoning, whispering. The Northern Lights the white man calls them, as they leap and play above the frozen peaks, but the Thlinget knows them to be the spirits of the dead, homeless in space but hovering confidently overhead until their relatives on earth can give a Potlatch for their repose.
Running like a black thread through the woof of the spirit tales was the mention of witch-craft—witchcraft with which Kilbuck was now preparing to deal; not because he hoped to benefit the natives and free them from the curse of superstition, but because owing to a belief in the black art, the Indians of Katleean were not bringing in the amount of furs expected, and this meant a loss of money to the Alaska Fur and Trading Company.
Ellen recalled the superior air of amusement with which the White Chief had told of the dominating belief in demons.
"When one of the beggars wants to cast a spell," he had said, his lip curling in a sardonic smile, "he takes a bit of cloth from some garment his enemy has worn and at the hour of midnight slinks into a graveyard and digs down until he finds a body. If he wants to cripple his enemy's hand, he puts the cloth in the fingers of the corpse. If he wishes his enemy to lose his mind he puts it over the skull, and if he wants him dead, he places the cloth over the heart in the coffin. Oh, they are a sweet outfit, I tell you!" The Chief had laughed as if these things were merely amusing. Then he had gone on to explain that across the Bay of Katleean in the shadow of the great blue glacier which was discernible on sunny days, there had been a lonely Thlinget graveyard. Because of its isolation this burial place had been so riddled with re-opened graves and so much killing, torturing and fighting had ensued among the Indians in their efforts to detect and punish so-called witches that he, their White Chief, had been obliged to interfere. He had put an end to the reign of sorcery in that particular graveyard rather cleverly, Ellen was forced to admit, by having all the bodies exhumed and cremated on the spot.
"They'll bring the ashes over here where I can keep an eye on them and prevent further 'witching,'" the trader had finished. "And after the Potlatch we'll have a little peace in the country, I hope. I never interfere with the Potlatches. They make good business for the Company, for the brown heathens believe the spirits are really feasting and rejoicing with them." Kilbuck laughed as at some recollection. "The Company sends in hundreds of blankets every year for dead Indians. Whenever a Potlatch blanket is given away the name of a dead man is called and he receives it in the spirit world. Whenever a little food is put on the Potlatch fire, a dead man's name is mentioned and he gets a square meal up there in Ghost's Home. Altogether the Alaska Fur and Trading Company does a lively business with the dead!"
As Ellen thought on these things there crept into her mother-heart a feeling of pity for these simple, trusting people seeking the protection and guidance of this white man only to have their beliefs and superstitions laughed at and exploited for the benefit of his company. She was beginning to feel, dimly, what every reader of the history of exploration knows, that drunkenness, fraud and trickery are among the first teachings the white man's civilization brings to the tribes of a new country.
A tinge of sadness and foreboding darkened her thoughts.