Chilcotin
Once a Being with great power sat on a stone in the middle of a river, and as he sat there, he wailed. So people were afraid to pass up and down in their canoes. But one day a man came poling upstream, and when he heard the wailing, he got out of his canoe and wailed with the stranger. Yet he was a little afraid and kept one foot in the canoe, ready to shove off.
The stranger said his son had been hunting in the snow mountains and had been buried by a snowslide. As the man wailed with him, Esterreqot was pleased. He took a sheet of metal on which he had been sitting and gave it to his visitor. He told him to come to his house in the mountains, but to come at night so no one would know it. Thus he did.
When the man came to the house of Esterreqot, he was given two boxes, one full of food and one full of blankets. The man took them back to his tribe and invited the people to a feast. When they came, they saw nothing for a feast. Then the man opened the boxes and took out food enough and blankets enough to fill the whole house, and there was a great potlatch.
That is how the Indians first secured blankets.
HUNTING IN THE SNOW MOUNTAINS
Chilcotin
Once there was a boy who was very bad. He had sung a shaman’s song, and the shaman had scolded him.
Now late in the autumn he went out hunting alone. He went up the Chilcotin River, to a place near Siwash Bridge. Here he found three beavers, so he killed them. He skinned them and hid the meat, and went on up into the snow mountains. He came to a great gulch in the mountains, and looking down he saw all kinds of animals—deer, caribou, mountain sheep, and mountain goats. And as he looked down upon them from the top, he wished his brother were there to help him, there were so many. Then he went to a small cañon at the head of the gulch and waited.
Soon the boy heard someone calling, away down the valley, and the caribou started to run up through the cañon. As they crowded in, the young man shot all the big ones, until they lay in heaps all around him. So he made his camp there and started to cut up the meat.