Nothing could be done but to throw back more hiaqua. Following each sacrifice came another lull, followed in turn by more terrible outbreaks. And so, string by string, he parted with all his gains. Then he sank to the ground insensible.
When he awoke he lay under an arbutus-tree in a meadow of camas. He was shockingly stiff and every movement pained him. But he managed to gather and smoke some dry arbutus-leaves and eat a few camas-bulbs. He was astonished to find his hair very long and matted, and himself bent and feeble. "Tamanoüs," he muttered. Nevertheless, he was calm and happy. Strangely, he did not regret his lost strings of hiaqua. Fear was gone and his heart was filled with love.
Slowly and painfully he made his way home. Everything was strangely altered. Ancient trees grew where shrubs had grown four days before. Cedars under whose shade he used to sleep lay rotting on the ground. Where his lodge had stood now he saw a new and handsome lodge, and presently out of it came a very old decrepit squaw who, nevertheless, through her wrinkles, had a look that seemed strangely familiar to him. Her shoulders were hung thick with hiaqua strings. She bent over a pot of boiling salmon and crooned:
"My old man has gone, gone, gone.
My old man to Tacoma has gone.
To hunt the elk he went long ago.
When will he come down, down, down
To salmon pot and me?"
"He has come down," quavered the returned traveller, at last recognizing his wife.
He asked no questions. Charging it all to the wrath of Tamanoüs, he accepted fate as he found it. After all, it was a happy fate enough in the end, for the old man became the Great Medicine-Man of his tribe, by whom he was greatly revered.
The name of this Rip Van Winkle of Mount Rainier is not mentioned in Mr. Winthrop's narrative.