Sometimes when the silver coins were very, very scarce, when her shoulders ached with the cold, and her lips longed for tea and her mouth for bread, when the smoked salmon revolted her, and her thin garments grew thinner, she would go out and stand gazing at the Totem Pole, and think of the great pile of coin that the last “collector” had offered for it—­a pile of coin that would fill all her needs until Tenas was old enough to help her, to take his father’s place at the 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 so fast, so big, that the time will not be long now before you can hunt down the wild birds for your Hoolool to eat, eh, little Spring Eyes?  But now you must go to sleep; perhaps you will dream of the great flocks of the fat, young, grey geese you are to get us for food.”