“I’ll tell you if I do; I’ll tell you in the morning if I dream of the little geese,” he would reply, his voice trailing away into dreamland as his eyes blinked themselves to sleep.

“Hoolool, I did dream last night,” he told her one early April day, when he awoke dewy-eyed and bird-like from a long night’s rest.  “But it was not of the bands of grey geese; it was of our great Totem Pole.”

“Did it speak to you in your dreams, little April Eyes?” she asked, playfully.

“No-o,” he hesitated, “it did not really speak, but it showed me something strange.  Do you think it will come true, Hoolool?” His dark, questioning eyes were pathetic in appeal.  He did want it to come true.

“Tell your Hoolool,” she replied indulgently, “and perhaps she can decide if the dream will come true.”

“You know how I longed to dream of the great flocks of young geese flying southward in September,” he said, longingly, his little thin elbows propped each on one of her knees, his small, dark chin in his hands, his wonderful eyes shadowy with the fairy dreams of childhood.  “But the flocks I saw were not flying grey geese, that make such fat eating, but around the foot of our Totem Pole I saw flocks and flocks of little tenas Totem Poles, hundreds of them.  They were not half as high as I am.  They were just baby ones you could take in your hand, Hoolool.  Could you take my knife the trader gave me and make me one just like our big one?  Only make it little, young—­oh, very tenas—­that I can carry it about with me.  I’ll paint it.  Will you make me one, Hoolool?”

The woman sat still, a peculiar stillness that came of half fear, half unutterable relief, and wholly of inspiration.  Then she caught up the boy, and her arms clung about him as if they would never release him.

“I know little of the white man’s God,” she murmured, “except that He is good, but I know that the Great Tyee (god) of the West is surely good.  One of them has sent you this dream, my little April Eyes.”

“Perhaps the Great Tyee and the white man’s God are the same,” the child said, innocent of expressing a wonderful truth. “You have two names—­’Marna’ (mother, in the Chinook) and ’Hoolool’—­yet you are the same.  Maybe it’s that way with the two Great Tyees, the white man’s and ours.  But why should they send me dreams of flocks of baby Totem Poles?”

“Because Hoolool will make you one to-day, and then flocks and flocks of tenas poles for the men with the silver coins.  I cannot sell them our great one, but I can make many small ones like it.  Oh! they will buy the little totems, and the great one will stand as the pride of your manhood and the honor of your old age.”  Her voice rang with the hope of the future, the confidence of years of difficulty overcome.