Hoolool of the Totem Pole

A Story of the North Pacific Coast

The upcoast people called her “Hoolool,” which means “The Mouse” in the Chinook tongue.  For was she not silent as the small, grey creature that depended on its own bright eyes and busy little feet to secure a living?

The fishermen and prospectors had almost forgotten the time when she had not lived alone with her little son, “Tenas,” for although Big Joe, her husband, had been dead but four years, time travels slowly north of Queen Charlotte Sound, and four years on the “Upper Coast” drag themselves more leisurely than twelve at the mouth of the Fraser River.  Big Joe had left her with but three precious possessions—­“Tenas,” their boy, the warm, roomy firwood house of the thrifty Pacific Coast Indian build, and the great Totem Pole that loomed outside at its northwestern corner like a guardian of her welfare and the undeniable hallmark of their child’s honorable ancestry and unblemished lineage.

After Big Joe died Hoolool would have been anchorless without that Totem Pole.  Its extraordinary carving, its crude but clever coloring, its massed figures of animals, birds and humans, all designed and carved out of the solid trunk of a single tree, meant a thousand times more to her than it did to the travellers who, in their great “Klondike rush,” thronged the decks of the northern-bound steamboats; than it did even to those curio-hunters who despoil the Indian lodges of their ancient wares, leaving their white man’s coin in lieu of old silver bracelets and rare carvings in black slate or finely woven cedar-root baskets.

Many times was she offered money for it, but Hoolool would merely shake her head, and, with a half smile, turn away, giving no reason for her refusal.

“The woman is like a mouse,” those would-be purchasers would say, so “Hoolool” she became, even to her little son, who called her the quaint word as a white child would call its mother a pet name; and she in turn called the little boy “Tenas,” which means “Youngness”—­the young spring, the young day, the young moon—­and he was all these blessed things to her.  But all the old-timers knew well why she would never part with the Totem Pole.

“No use to coax her,” they would tell the curio-hunters.  “It is to her what your family crest is to you.  Would you sell your crest?”

So year after year the greedy-eyed collectors would go away empty-handed, their coin in their pockets, and Hoolool’s silent refusal in their memories.

Yet how terribly she really needed their money she alone knew.  To be sure, she had her own firewood in the forest that crept almost to her door, and in good seasons the salmon fishing was a great help.  She caught and smoked and dried this precious food, stowing it away for use through the long winter months; but life was a continual struggle, and Tenas was yet too young to help her in the battle.