One year there was a Hlahi dance in El Hakam. Kol Tibichi was a man. He was thirty years old then. He went to the dance. Tulitot was the great Hlahi in that place, and he thought himself better than Kol Tibichi. While dancing, Tulitot took a snake from his mouth, a large rattlesnake, and held it in both hands as he danced. The snake was his own child. Kol Tibichi looked, and thought he could do better; and, dancing forward, he blew, as Hlahis do, and threw out long burning flames on both sides of his mouth. All present were afraid, and with Tulitot ran back before him in fear.
When the dance was over, Kol Tibichi went to Norpat Kodi and lived on, a great Hlahi: lived till he was a hundred years of age and more. He could not walk any longer. He knew that he could not live. “I cannot live any more,” said he. “My yapaitu tells me this,—I cannot walk. I cannot do anything. My yapaitu tells me that I must leave Norpat Kodiheril. [He was not sick, but decrepit.] My yapaitu is going to take me and leave my bones in this place with you. When I go from my body, do not bury it. Leave it on the ground out there. Let it lie one night. Next morning you will see a large rock in place of it. When people are sick, let them come and take a piece of the rock, or some earth, or some moss from it; that will cure them.”
“We will not do that,” said Notisa, a son of the first chief; “we bury every body, and we will bury yours like all others.”
“Do not bury my bones,” said Kol Tibichi.
“We should not like to see your bones all the time. We have no wish to see a rock in place of them.”
“Well, take my body to the black-oak tree, put it eight or ten feet from the ground, leave it there one night; next morning you will see water in a hollow of the oak. Any man may come and get that water, rub it on his body, and drink some. It will cure him.”
“No,” said the chief, “we don’t want to see the tree there every day. We do not wish to look at it all the time.”
“Dig a deep grave, then,” said Kol Tibichi; “put my body in with nothing around it. When you come to mourn, do not stand east of the grave-mound. On the morning after my burial you will see a rainbow coming out of the grave.”
Kol Tibichi died. They did everything just as he told them. All saw the rainbow and said, “We ought to have left his body above ground, and to have done all that he asked of us at first. The yapaitu is mourning for him.”
The rainbow stood there two days and two nights at the grave, then moved two feet eastward. Next morning it was four feet away, then eight, going farther day by day till it was at the salmon-house where Kol Tibichi used to go when a boy. It stood there by the salmon-house five days. Next it was on the north bank of the river, then on the hillside beyond, then on the hilltop, then on the mountain-slope, then on the mountain-top. Next all the people in Norpat Kodiheril heard a noise and knocking in the grave-mound one night, and early next morning they saw an immense bird rising out of Kol Tibichi’s grave. First the head came, and then the body. At sunrise it came out altogether, and flew to the sugar-pine from which Kol Tibichi had hung head downward in childhood. It perched on the tree, stayed five minutes, and then flew away, flew to the mountain, to the rainbow, went into the rainbow. The bird and rainbow went away, disappeared together. The bird was Komus Kulit. The rainbow was Kol Tibichi’s yapaitu.