The Moccasin Maker

by E. Pauline Johnson

I shook my head. This was always the crucial moment with my
Klootchman, when her voice lowers, and she asks if you know things.
You must be diplomatic, and never question her in turn. If you do
her lips will close in unbreakable silence.

"I have heard no story, but I have heard the Falls 'whisper, laugh and weep.' That is enough for me," I said, with seeming indifference.

"What do you see when you look at them from across the canyon?" she asked. "Do they look to you like anything else but falling water?"

I thought for a moment before replying. Memory seemed to hold up against an indistinct photograph of towering fir-crested heights, where through a broken ridge of rock a shower of silvery threads cascaded musically down, down, down, until they lost themselves in the mighty Fraser, that hurled itself through the yawning canyon stretched at my feet. I have never seen such slender threads of glowing tissue save on early morning cobwebs at sun-up.

"The Falls look like cobwebs," I said, as the memory touched me.
"Millions of fine misty cobwebs woven together."

"Then the legend must be true," she uttered, half to herself. I slipped down on my treasured wolf-skin rug near her chair, and with hands locked about my knees, sat in silence, knowing it was the one and only way to lure her to speech. She arose, helped herself to more tea, and with the toe of her beaded moccasin idly stroked one of the wolf-skin paws. "Yes," she said, with some decision, "the Indian men of magic say that the falls are cobwebs twisted and braided together."

I nodded, but made no comment; then her voice droned into the broken English, that, much as I love it, I must leave to the reader's imagination. "Indian mothers are strange," she began. I nodded again.

"Yes, they are strange, and there is a strange tie between them and their children. The men of magic say they can see that tie, though you and I cannot. It is thin, fine silvery as a cobweb, but strong as the ropes of wild vine that swing down the great canyons. No storm ever breaks those vines; the tempests that drag the giant firs and cedars up by their roots, snap their branches and break their boles, never break the creeping vines. They may be torn from their strongholds, but in the young months of the summer the vine will climb up, and cling again. Nothing breaks it. So is the cobweb tie the Men of Magic see between the Indian mother and her child.

"There was a time when no falls leapt and sang down the heights at Lillooet, and in those days our men were very wild and warlike; but the women were gentle and very beautiful, and they loved and lived and bore children as women have done before, and since.

"But there was one, more gentle, more beautiful than all others of the tribe. 'Be-be,' our people call her; it is the Chinook word for 'a kiss.' None of our people knew her real name; but it was a kiss of hers that made this legend, so as 'Be-be' we speak of her.