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it so that they might put this water on the rice when they ate it. As he was bound for Klukwan, the village farthest up the river, he said to his children, "Blow on the sail." They did so and passed right up to Klukwan. Then he stood up in his canoe and began to talk. They took all of his stuff up, and in the evening the drums were beaten as a sign that he was going to give out property.
He began to cry in the customary manner as he beat the drums. Then he took a piece of bark and put it in front of his eyes, upon which the tears ran down it in a stream. Afterward he gave out two copper plates and invited the people to eat what he had brought. Then the people danced for him in return, and a man came in with something very shiny on top of his head.[1]
That is all he told when he returned.
27. THE ALSEK RIVER PEOPLE
Once there was a famine among the people of Alsek (Alse x) river. There were two shamans there, one of whom began singing to bring up eulachon, while the other sang for strength in order to obtain bears and other forest animals.
The first shaman s spirit told him that if he would go down the little rapids he would see great numbers of eulachon. So he dressed up next morning and went straight down under the water in a little canoe.
That night the other shaman s spirits came to him, saying that the first shaman would remain under water for four nights; that he had gone into a house where were eulachon, salmon, and other fish and had thrown the door open.
At the end of four days they hunted all around and found him lying dead on the beach amid piles of eulachon. As soon as they brought him up, all the eulachon that were in the ocean started to run up river, and everyone tried to preserve as many of them as he could.
In the same town were two menstruaiit women, and the other shaman told these that there would be a great many land otters about the town that evening. Just as he had said, at the time when his spirits came to him that evening, numbers of land-otter-men came through the village. They could be heard whistling about the town. Finally some one said, "Why is it that it sounds as if they were all where the two women are?" Sure enough, they found that the land otters were talking inside of the two women. The ones that were inside of them were really land-otter-men, that is, men who had been taken away by the land otters and made like themselves.
A person would often creep close up to these women to find out what they were, but every time something spoke out inside, "Do not
- ↑ This last was said to be "the way the story went," but otherwise was unexplained.