Then the boy saw three men coming up the valley. As they came near, they asked, “Did you kill all these caribou?” He answered, “Yes, I did.”
Now these three men were Nun, or wolves. The Nun told the boy they had found his beaver meat in the valley below, and had eaten it. So they had helped him in his hunt. They had called away down in the valley and frightened the caribou.
Now the young man stayed at that place and hunted caribou and dried the meat until it made a huge pile. Then he danced and sang around the pile of meat, until it shrank into two large packs. So he started home. He carried one pack one day, and then went back and brought up the other pack. But he became tired. That was slow work. Therefore he danced and sang around these two packs until they became one small pack. Then he continued home. At last he reached the place where he had killed the beaver. He took the skins.
Then he came to the top of a hill near his village. He dropped the small pack of meat and it became at once a huge pile, just as it was before he danced and sang around it. Now he came into the village and heard wailing. The people thought he was lost. They were wailing for him.
The next morning the boy told the men to go to the top of the hill and bring in the meat he had left there. Two men started, but he told more to go. Then he ordered others to go, until all the men in the village had gone. When they brought the meat in, the young man gave a great meat potlatch.
So the boy became a shaman. The wolves were his helpers.
COYOTE’S GIFT OF THE SALMON AND THE CAÑON OF THE FRASER RIVER
Nicola Valley and Fraser River
Coyote was powerful in magic, and therefore he was sent into the world by Old One. He spent much time traveling in the Shuswap and Okanogan countries. It is said that he lived with Old One before coming to earth, and that after he finished his work—as some say—he went back to Old One. But others say that Old One built him a house of transparent ice and put inside of it a log of wood which burns forever. The aurora is the light of Coyote’s fire, shining through the ice, or the reflection of it cast up by the ice. Coyote can hear when people speak his name. When he rolls over in his sleep, it creates the sharp wind which makes the earth so cold.
Coyote lived for many years in Nicola Valley. He hunted elk and deer in the winter time, and in the early fall he fished for salmon about six miles above Spence’s Bridge where he had a weir across the Thompson River. Even yet it is called “Coyote’s Weir.”