The old woman said: “Grandchildren, I want you to bring me gum from the cedar trees.” When they brought it, she covered her face with it and stopped up her eyes. Then she lay down with her head over the hole and didn’t go out of the house again all winter. Some mornings she woke [[204]]up and gave a handful of roots to the children. In the night, when the children were asleep, she ate plenty of roots herself.
One morning her daughter asked: “How is it that rats are always gnawing; why don’t you kill them?”
“I wish you wouldn’t listen to everything,” said the old woman.
One morning she said to the little girl: “I wish you wouldn’t cry in the night.”
The mother said: “You don’t give the children enough to eat; they are hungry.”
“You don’t know about the winter,” said the old woman. “It’s going to be long, and our roots won’t last: the snow will be deep yet.”
The children were hungry, but their mother said: “You mustn’t cry, it makes your grandmother worse.”
The boy said: “Let us kill her; she has no eyes.”
“If we tried to kill her, she would kill us; you are small and I couldn’t run fast enough to get away from her.”
“What are you whispering about?” asked the grandmother.