'Why are you crying? Did you not see your father?'
'Yes, and he took me for a fox.'
'Why, what else do you think you are?' asked the old woman in surprise. 'But return at once to your father who will want to kill you; and be sure you let him do it.'
'Very well, I will do your bidding,' answered the girl, though the order seemed strange to her.
The next day the girl went down to the beach and saw her father fishing still closer to the shore.
'Why, here is that big fox again,' cried he, and she did not move, but waited while he fitted an arrow to his bow and shot her in the heart. Then his wife got out of the canoe and began to skin the fox, and as she did so she found something on its foreleg which made her start.
'Surely that is my daughter's bracelet,' said she. 'Yet that is not possible!' And she continued her work. By and by she came to the throat, and there lay a necklace. 'Surely that is my daughter's necklace,' she repeated, and then she called to her husband, saying:
'I found our daughter's necklace and bracelet in this skin. Something that we know not of must have turned her into a fox.' And they both cried, for they remembered how the fox had run to meet them instead of going away.
But Indians are learned in things of which other people are ignorant, and they quickly set to work and laid the fox's body on a mat, and covered it with bags of eagle's down which every tribe has ready to use, and over all they placed a mat, weeping as they did so. After that they fasted and cleaned up their houses, and the girl's relations fasted likewise and cleaned up their houses. For many days they did this, and at length, at midnight, the father and mother felt their house shaking beneath them, and heard a noise coming from the room where the body lay. Taking a burning stick, the mother hastened to the room, and found her daughter in her own shape, having become a doctor or shaman. Happy indeed were they to behold her thus; but, curious to say, the girl's husband at that moment lost all his wealth and was as poor as ever.
[Tlingit Myths.]