Part 4
The sisters started toward Mlaiksi, and Yaulilik took Cogátkis to Duilas. Cogátkis could watch his sisters, and he could talk with his mother, though the house was a long way off.
The sisters gathered seeds all day. When it was nearly dark, the elder sister asked: “Shall we stay here to-night?”
“We have only a few seeds,” said the younger sister. “We can stay all night and fill our baskets in the morning.”
When Cogátkis saw them picking up wood, he went home. Early the next morning he went again to Duilas. The girls were busy gathering seeds, so Cogátkis called to his mother: “They are at work again!”
At midday the younger sister said: “I want water; where can we get some?”
“I don’t know. There is no water near here.”
They were at the foot of Mlaiksi. The younger sister looked at the mountain, and said: “High up there is a green place; maybe there is water there. I will go and see.”
She climbed the mountain till she came to soft ground, then went higher and came to a place where the ground was moist. She dug down and found mud, but no water; she went higher, and this time, when she came to moist earth and dug down, she found a little water. She called her sister, and both drank of the water and then filled their water baskets.
They gathered seeds a while. The younger sister kept going up the mountain. The elder sister said: “Don’t go so high; you won’t find any seeds up there. It is getting late. Let us go back to where we camped last night.”
The younger sister heard a strange noise and wanted to find out what made it. She thought: “I will go back now, but to-morrow I will go to that green place that I can see way up there. Maybe I will find out what that noise is.”
When they got to the foot of the mountain and began to pick up wood Cogátkis went home, and said to his mother: “My sisters have camped where they camped last night.”
That night the younger sister couldn’t sleep; she was thinking of the strange noise she had heard: she felt drawn toward the sound. The next morning they gathered seeds till their baskets were full, then the younger sister said: “I want water. I am going to the place where we got some yesterday.”
They left their baskets and climbed up to where they had dug the hole; there was no water in it. They went higher, came to moist ground, dug down and got a little water. The younger sister again heard the strange sound. She went higher and listened; then she heard, far away, a weak voice saying: “Kĕlmas popanwe. Kĕlmas popanwe!” (You are drinking nothing but tears. You are drinking nothing but tears.)
The girl followed the sound, and saw a bright red hair on the ground. When she picked it up she knew it was a hair from the head of the man who had killed her and her sister. The place where she found the hair was level and smooth, without a blade of grass or a weed on it. In the middle of that space was a skeleton. All the bones were dead but the eyes were living. It was Isis’ skeleton. Thousands of deer had been there and danced around the man who had killed so many of their people. With their hoofs they had stamped down the grass and beaten the ground level.
When the elder sister saw the skeleton she was frightened and wanted to run away, but the younger sister spread out her wolf skin blanket and put the skeleton on it.
“What are you going to do with that?” asked her sister. “It smells badly. It makes me sick.” She wanted to snatch the skeleton and break it up.
“Go away!” said the younger girl. “I will bring this to life.” She wrapped the bones up carefully and started down the mountain, her sister following.
When they got to their camp the elder said: “Let me have those bones; they are the bones of the man who killed us. I’ll pound them up and burn them.”
The younger sister didn’t listen to what the elder said. She got deer fat, rubbed the skeleton with it, and pushed some of the fat between the teeth. She worked over the skeleton all night. In the morning there was a little flesh on the bones; at midday the skeleton was a man again.
The younger sister fed him, and the elder gathered seeds for him, for she liked him now.
Cogátkis called to his mother: “I see two persons sitting in the shade while my elder sister gathers seeds.” The next morning he called to his mother: “The stranger is alone; both my sisters are gathering seeds.”
Isis drank water, then lay down and slept. While he was sleeping porcupines danced around him, and sang. The sisters came at midday, and when the porcupines saw them coming they ran away.
The next morning the younger sister said to Isis: “This is the last day we can gather seeds near by. We must go farther up the mountain.”
When Isis was left alone, he fell asleep. The porcupines came and danced around him and sang, and each one’s song was: “Who can cut off my feet and hands and eat them?”
Isis woke up, struck the chief of the porcupines with his cane, killed him, cut off his feet and hands, pulled the quills out of his back and tied them up in ten bunches. He wanted to give the quills to his wives and his mother-in-law. Isis was well now, and could hunt for deer.
Soon the elder sister had a child. Isis stayed in the camp till the child was five days old; then he went out to hunt. He killed a deer, but he let it stay where it fell, for it wasn’t right to bring it home or say anything about it. The next day he killed two deer at a shot, left them and went home.
When the first child was seven days old, the younger sister had a little boy. When the last child was eight days old, Isis said to his wives: “Your mother and brother are lonesome, we must go and see them.”
The next day they started. The sisters complained of the weight of the seeds, and Isis said: “I will make them light.” As soon as he said that, their baskets were as light as feathers.
When Cogátkis saw his sisters and the stranger coming, he called to his mother: “My sisters are coming, and there is a beautiful blue man with them!”
Old Yaulilik spread out nice mats and her daughters’ bead dresses and ornaments. When near the house, Isis stopped and the sisters went on. Cogátkis ran to meet them; he was glad, but he was afraid of Isis. The sisters said: “Go and lead your brother-in-law into the house.”
When they were in the house, Cogátkis told Isis how deer ran around him while he was out on the mountain watching his sisters.
Isis said: “I want to go and hunt for deer, but I haven’t arrows enough.”
“I will give you all the arrows you want,” said old Yaulilik, and she gave him a quiverful that had been her husband’s. Isis killed two deer.
“How can we carry them home?” asked Cogátkis.
Isis picked up the deer and put them in his belt. On the way home he killed a third deer, and he put that in his belt also. When Cogátkis told his younger sister how many deer Isis had killed, she said: “Maybe he will go away. Maybe he doesn’t want to stay here.”
Isis pulled up six big trees, brought them to the house, and set them up to dry meat on. The next morning he killed a deer and said to Cogátkis: “Stay here and see that nobody steals the deer while I am gone.” When he came back, he had ten deer in his belt. He put the first deer with them and went home. Old Yaulilik cut up the meat and hung it on the trees to dry, and Isis stretched the skins.
The next day when he was going home, with his belt full of deer, he wanted water and went to Tsiwisa to get it. After he had drunk, he remembered that the spring was near the place where Kumush had made the tree, with the eagle’s nest on it, grow up to the sky. He didn’t like the place, for it made him feel lonesome. That night he said to the sisters: “I am going away. You have plenty of meat; you can stay here with your mother and brother.”
The elder sister didn’t want to stay, and Isis said: “I am going a long way. The children are heavy; you couldn’t carry them.”
“We can carry them easily,” said the elder sister. “I don’t want to stay here.”
“Then you can go,” said Isis, for he wasn’t willing to show that he wanted them to stay.
Her sister said: “He is going to a strange country; something may happen to me. I don’t want to go.”
“You must go with us, so get ready,” said the elder sister.
The younger sister said to her mother: “I didn’t ask to go with them; she makes me go.”
“You can stay with me,” said her mother.
“No, maybe they will be gone a long time. I will go with them, and it won’t be my fault if something happens.”
The three traveled one day, then camped at Blaiaga, the mountain where Isis and Kumush had lived. Isis said to his wives: “The spring here is bad. When you go for water you must take the children with you.”
Each day for three days Isis killed deer. The fourth day, while he was hunting, the younger sister put her child on her back and went for wood. The elder sister wanted water and she ran to the spring to get it. She forgot that Isis had told her not to leave her child alone. The boy was beginning to walk. He tried to follow his mother, but he fell and hit his head on a stone. He gave one loud scream and died. The younger sister heard the scream and ran to the child. The mother heard it, too, and came back quickly. Her sister said: “I told you we had better stay with our mother; that we didn’t know this country. See what trouble has come to us.” They set bushes on fire to let Isis know what had happened.
The moment the child fell, Isis struck his foot against a stone and stumbled. Right away he knew that something had happened to one of his boys. When he saw the smoke, he left the deer he had killed and went home.
When the younger sister told him that his child was dead, he said: “I didn’t think that my wives would cause me greater grief than my father did, but you have. I thought my children would live, that they would go to the swimming places and talk to the earth and mountains, that they would be wise and able to do things. If my first child is dead, I don’t want to live in this world. Bring me the other boy.”
When the younger wife brought her child, Isis took it in his arms, put the top of its head to his mouth and drew a long breath. He took the breath out of the child and it was dead. He put the second child by the first, and said:
“These children are half mine, and half yours. The breath is mine, the body is yours. I have taken the breath into myself. You can have the bodies. This is the last time I will have a wife. If I live forever I shall never have a woman again. This place where my children died will be called Yaulilikumwas. People who come in after times will find you under the bushes. They will make sport of you and call you Yaulilikumwas. You will die from the cold and snow which you yourselves make. Your brother will run around the world and be Kĕngkong’kongis (a medicine) and doctors will dream of him.”
Right away Isis’ wives and their mother turned to snowbirds and Cogátkis became Kĕngkong’kongis. Sometimes ordinary people see him in their dreams. Doctors always see him in the country where his mother and sisters lived. Isis went north, went far away.
KUMUSH AND HIS DAUGHTER
CHARACTERS
Kumush The Creator, according to Indian myths Skoks Spirit
Kumush (our Father) left Tula Lake and wandered over the earth. He went to the edge of the world and was gone a great many years; then he came back to Nihlaksi, where his sweat-house had been; where Látkakáwas brought the disk; where the body of the beautiful blue man was burned, and where Isis was saved.
Kumush brought his daughter with him from the edge of the world. Where he got her, no one knows. When he came back, Isis and all the people he had made were dead; he and his daughter were alone. The first thing he did was to give the young girl ten dresses, which he made by his word. The finest dress of all was the burial dress; it was made of buckskin, and so covered with bright shells that not a point of the buckskin could be seen.
The first of the ten dresses was for a young girl; the second was the maturity dress, to be worn while dancing the maturity dance; the third was the dress to be put on after coming from the sweat-house, the day the maturity dance ended; the fourth was to be worn on the fifth day after the dance; the fifth dress was the common, everyday dress; the sixth was to wear when getting wood; the seventh when digging roots; the eighth was to be used when on a journey; the ninth was to wear at a ball game; the tenth was the burial dress.
When they came to Nihlaksi Kumush’s daughter was within a few days of maturity. In the old time, when he was making rules for his people, Kumush had said that at maturity a girl should dance five days and five nights, and while she was dancing an old woman, a good singer, should sing for her. When the five days and nights were over she should bathe in the sweat-house, and then carry wood for five days. If the girl grew sleepy while she was dancing, stopped for a moment, nodded and dreamed, or if she fell asleep while in the sweat-house and dreamed of some one’s death, she would die herself.
Kumush was the only one to help his daughter; he sang while she danced. When the dance was over and the girl was in the sweat-house, she fell asleep and dreamed of some one’s death. She came out of the sweat-house with her face and hands and body painted with wáginte. [6] As she stood by the fire to dry the paint, she said to her father: “While I was in the sweat-house I fell asleep and I dreamed that as soon as I came out some one would die.”
“That means your own death,” said Kumush. “You dreamed of yourself.”
Kumush was frightened; he felt lonesome. When his daughter asked for her burial dress he gave her the dress to be worn after coming from the sweat-house, but she wouldn’t take it. Then he gave her the dress to be worn five days later, and she refused it. One after another he offered her eight dresses—he could not give her the one she had worn when she was a little girl, for it was too small. He held the tenth dress tight under his arm; he did not want to give it to her, for as soon as she put it on the spirit would leave her body.
“Why don’t you give me my dress?” asked she. “You made it before you made the other dresses, and told me what it was for; why don’t you give it to me now? You made everything in the world as you wanted it to be.”
He gave her the dress, but he clung to it and cried. When she began to put it on he tried to pull it away. She said: “Father, you must not cry. What has happened to me is your will; you made it to be this way. My spirit will leave the body and go west.”
At last Kumush let go of the dress, though he knew her spirit would depart as soon as she had it on. He was crying as he said: “I will go with you; I will leave my body here, and go.”
“No,” said the daughter, “my spirit will go west without touching the ground as it goes. How could you go with me?”
“I know what to do,” said Kumush. “I know all things above, below, and in the world of ghosts; whatever is, I know.”
She put on the dress, Kumush took her hand, and they started, leaving their bodies behind. Kumush was not dead but his spirit left the body.
As soon as the daughter died, she knew all about the spirit world. When they started she said to her father: “Keep your eyes closed; if you open them you will not be able to follow me, you will have to go back and leave me alone.”
The road they were traveling led west to where the sun sets. Along that road were three nice things to eat: goose eggs, wild cherries and crawfish. If a spirit ate of the wild cherries it would be sent back to this world, a spirit without a body, to wander about homeless, eating wild cherries and other kinds of wild fruit. If it ate of the goose eggs, it would wander around the world, digging goose eggs out of the ground, like roots. It would have to carry the eggs in a basket without a bottom, and would always be trying to mend the basket with plaited grass. If it ate of the crawfish it would have to dig crawfish in the same way.
A Skoks offered Kumush’s daughter these three harmful things, but she did not look at them; she went straight on toward the west, very fast.
After a time Kumush asked: “How far have we gone now?”
“We are almost there,” said the girl. “Far away I see beautiful roses. Spirits that have been good in life take one of those roses with the leaves, those that have been bad do not see the roses.”
Again Kumush asked: “How far are we now?”
“We are passing the place of roses.”
Kumush thought: “She should take one of those roses.”
The girl always knew her father’s thoughts. As soon as that thought came into his mind, she put back her hand and, without turning, pulled a rose and two leaves. Kumush did not take one. He could not even see them, for he was not dead.
After a time they came to a road so steep that they could slide down it. At the beginning of the descent there was a willow rope. The girl pulled the rope and that minute music and voices were heard. Kumush and his daughter slipped down and came out on a beautiful plain with high walls all around it. It was a great house, and the plain was its floor. That house is the whole underground world, but only spirits know the way to it.
Kumush’s daughter was greeted by spirits that were glad to see her, but to Kumush they said “Sonk!” (raw, not ripe), and they felt sorry for him that he was not dead.
Kumush and his daughter went around together, and Kumush asked: “How far is it to any side?”
“It is very far, twice as far as I can see. There is one road down,—the road we came,—and another up. No one can come in by the way leading up, and no one can go up by the way leading down.”
The place was beautiful and full of spirits; there were so many that if every star of the sky, and all the hairs on the head of every man and all the hairs on all the animals were counted they would not equal in number the spirits in that great house.
When Kumush and his daughter first got there they couldn’t see the spirits though they could hear voices, but after sunset, when darkness was in the world above, it was light in that house below.
“Keep your eyes closed,” said Kumush’s daughter. “If you open them, you will have to leave me and go back.”
At sunset Kumush made himself small, smaller than any thing living in the world. His daughter put him in a crack, high up in a corner of the broad house, and made a mist before his eyes.
When it was dark, Wus-Kumush, the keeper of the house, said: “I want a fire!” Right away a big, round, bright fire sprang up in the center, and there was light everywhere in the house. Then spirits came from all sides, and there were so many that no one could have counted them. They made a great circle around Kumush’s daughter, who stood by the fire, and then they danced a dance not of this world, and sang a song not of this world. Kumush watched them from the corner of the house. They danced each night, for five nights. All the spirits sang, but only those in the circle danced. As daylight came they disappeared. They went away to their own places, lay down and became dry, disjointed bones.
Wus-Kumush gave Kumush’s daughter goose eggs and crawfish. She ate them and became bones. All newcomers became bones, but those who had been tried for five years, and hadn’t eaten anything the Skoks gave them, lived in shining settlements outside, in circles around the big house. Kumush’s daughter became bones, but her spirit went to her father in the corner.
On the sixth night she moved him to the eastern side of the house. That night he grew tired of staying with the spirits; he wanted to leave the underground world, but he wanted to take some of the spirits with him to people the upper world. “Afterward,” said he, “I am going to the place where the sun rises. I shall travel on the sun’s road till I come to where he stops at midday. There I will build a house.”
“Some of the spirits are angry with you,” said Wus-Kumush. “Because you are not dead they want to kill you; you must be careful.”
“They may try as hard as they like,” said Kumush; “they can’t kill me. They haven’t the power. They are my children; they are all from me. If they should kill me it would only be for a little while. I should come to life again.”
The spirits, though they were bones then, heard this, and said: “We will crush the old man’s heart out, with our elbows.”
Kumush left Wus-Kumush and went back to the eastern side of the house. In his corner was a pile of bones. Every bone in the pile rose up and tried to kill him, but they couldn’t hit him, for he dodged them. Each day his daughter moved him, but the bones knew where he was, because they could see him. Every night the spirits in the form of living people danced and sang; at daylight they lay down and became disconnected bones.
“I am going away from this place,” said Kumush, “I am tired of being here.” At daybreak he took his daughter’s bones, and went around selecting bones according to their quality, thinking which would do for one tribe and which for another. He filled a basket with them, taking only shin-bones and wrist-bones. He put the basket on his back and started to go up the eastern road, the road out. The path was steep and slippery, and his load was heavy. He slipped and stumbled but kept climbing. When he was half-way up, the bones began to elbow him in the back and neck, struggling to kill him. When near the top the strap slipped from his forehead and the basket fell. The bones became spirits, and, whooping and shouting, fell down into the big house and became bones again.
“I’ll not give up,” said Kumush; “I’ll try again.” He went back, filled the basket with bones and started a second time. When he was half-way up he said: “You’ll see that I will get to the upper world with you bones!” That minute he slipped, his cane broke and he fell. Again the bones became spirits and went whooping and shouting back to the big house.
Kumush went down a second time, and filled the basket. He was angry, and he chucked the bones in hard. “You want to stay here,” said he, “but when you know my place up there, where the sun is, you’ll want to stay there always and never come back to this place. I feel lonesome when I see no people up there; that is why I want to take you there. If I can’t get you up now, you will never come where I am.”
When he put the basket on his back the third time, he had no cane, so he thought: “I wish I had a good, strong cane.” Right away he had it. Then he said: “I wish I could get up with this basketful of bones.”
When half-way up the bones again tried to kill him. He struggled and tugged hard. At last he got near the edge of the slope, and with one big lift he threw the basket up on to level ground. “Maklaksûm káko!” (Indian bones) said he.
He opened the basket and threw the bones in different directions. As he threw them, he named the tribe and kind of Indians they would be. When he named the Shastas he said: “You will be good fighters.” To the Pitt River and the Warm Spring Indians he said: “You will be brave warriors, too.” But to the Klamath Indians he said: “You will be like women, easy to frighten.” The bones for the Modoc Indians he threw last, and he said to them: “You will eat what I eat, you will keep my place when I am gone, you will be bravest of all. Though you may be few, even if many and many people come against you, you will kill them.” And he said to each handful of bones as he threw it: “You must find power to save yourselves, find men to go and ask the mountains for help. Those who go to the mountains must ask to be made wise, or brave, or a doctor. They must swim in the gauwams and dream. When you are sure that a doctor has tried to kill some one, or that he won’t put his medicine in the path of a spirit and turn it back, you will kill him. If an innocent doctor is killed, you must kill the man who killed him, or he must pay for the dead man.”