hunting, the
fishing, and above all, in the logging camps up the coast.

"I would sell it to-day if they came," she would murmur. "I would not be
strong enough to refuse, to say no."

Then Tenas, knowing her desperate thoughts, would slip, mouse-like,
beside her and say:

"Hoolool, you are looking with love on our great Totem Pole--with love,
as you always do. It means that I shall be a great man some day, does it
not, Hoolool?"

Then the treachery of her thoughts would roll across her heart like a
crushing weight, and she knew that no thirst for tea, no hunger for
flour-bread, no shivering in thin garments, would ever drive her to part
with it. For the grotesque, carven thing was the very birthright of
her boy. Every figure, hewn with infinite patience by his sire's, his
grandsire's, his great-grandsire's, hands meant the very history from
which sprang the source of red blood in his young veins, the birth of
each generation, its deeds of valor, its achievements, its honors, its
undeniable right to the family name.

Should Tenas grow to youth, manhood, old age, and have no Totem Pole to
point to as a credential of being the honorable son of a long line of
honorable sons? Never! She would suffer in silence, like the little
grey, hungry Hoolool that scampered across the bare floors of her
firwood shack in the chill night hours, but her boy must have his
birthright. And so the great pole stood unmoved, baring its grinning
figures to the storms, the suns, the grey rains of the Pacific Coast,
but by its very presence it was keeping these tempests from entering
the heart of the lonely woman at its feet.

It was the year that spring came unusually early, weeks earlier than the
oldest Indian recalled its ever having come before. March brought the
wild geese honking northward, and great flocks of snow-white swans came
daily out of the southern horizon to sail overhead and lose themselves
along the Upper Coast, for it was mating and nesting time, and the heat
of the south had driven them early from its broad lagoons.

Every evening Tenas would roll himself in his blanket bed, while he
chatted about the migrating birds, and longed for the time when he would
be a great hunter, able to shoot the game as they flitted southward with
their large families in September.

"_Then_, Hoolool, we will have something better to eat than the smoked
salmon," he would say.

"Yes, little loved one," she would reply, "and you are growing