At the ceremonies the old men saw that I was well provided for, and because I had been away four years I was given a seat with the chief men of the village; and people tried to attach me to Anvik in other ways. Women are the berry gatherers, and so women would ask me to come and eat berries at their houses. At other times men would invite me. Once one of the chiefs met me as he came in from a hunt. He invited me to his house to eat. Instead of saying, however, “Do you want to come now?” or “Let’s go,” he said, “Wait a while.” From that I understood that he did not want me to follow him directly to the house because he had a daughter in the corner, and I knew too that he wanted me to become a suitor. He was afraid if I went along with him I might ask a question about her in the open sky—that would be othlang.
More than once an old man would say to me, “We want to see you settled down with a good-hearted girl who will take good care of you and keep to the customs. We don’t want to see you with a Mission girl. They don’t amount to much, they have lost their pride.” (You see the Mission girls don’t have to make their clothing or look ahead. Because of famines we always look ahead. People become greatly alarmed when they are down to a few skins, etc.; they are prudent, they watch themselves—except in ceremonies when they give away everything.)
And the old man might go on to say, “A man is no more than his wife. You must use your head enough to get a village girl. If you will go with the right kind of a girl here, we won’t say anything. We don’t care if you slip in at night and slip out again.” Some one else then might laugh out and make a joke. “If you went in you might upset a bowl and have to get out!” Being a Mission boy they thought I might be awkward.
People do not want young men to marry out of their village, and so, just as soon as a boy kills his first game, as soon as he can run his chase down and trap—perhaps he is only sixteen or so—they want him to take a girl. Nor do people welcome foreign suitors. They suspect them. A man never gives up connections with his own people—at ceremonies, for example, men who have wandered off may return home, and then they sit in the old place with their own people, even if the wife’s people are there too. Outsiders are invited to ceremonies. Two messengers are sent out to carry the invitation to other villages. From the masks the messengers wear, people know whether the performance is to be a mask ceremonial, a spirit ceremonial, or an ordinary “feast.” In the old days of raids of one village upon another, when all but the chiefs and the girls were killed, a foreigner might betray his wife’s people to his own people, telling them of weakness from an epidemic or from lack of warriors for various reasons, or telling about an abundance of stored food. And so even now people are suspicious of foreigners. If you do not marry within your village, they joke about you—they joke so much that it makes it disagreeable.
When I had volunteered to go into the American army, people said to me, “If you died among us, we would see to it that you were sent off right; but if you die on a battlefield you might be blown to pieces; men would track over you.”
“I am not afraid,” I answered.
“You are not afraid; but we want to look out for you.... Give a minx skin to the shaman; he thinks highly of you, he would not expect much to safeguard you.” Three men and two women came to me to urge this. Finally the shaman himself came. He said, “I will not ask you to pay anything. Let me but tattoo on your back the image of cross-guns.”
“No,” I said, “it would not do when I came to be examined by the white army doctor.”
“I will give you a skin-tight shirt with the cross-guns on it. You can take off the shirt before the examination.”
“No, in the army you may wear only what the government gives you to wear.”