Mount Rainier, a Record of Exploration. Various
slow, meagre gains. He wanted the splendid elation of vast wealth and the excitement of sudden wealth. His own peculiar tamanoüs was the elk. Elk was also his totem, the cognizance of his freemasonry with those of his own family, and their family friends in other tribes. Elk, therefore, were every way identified with his life; and he hunted them farther and farther up through the forests on the flanks of Tacoma, hoping that some day his tamanoüs would speak in the dying groan of one of them, and gasp out the secret of the mines of hiaqua, his heart's desire.
"Tacoma was so white and glittering, that it seemed to stare at him very terribly and mockingly, and to know his shameful avarice, and how it led him to take from starving women their cherished lip and nose jewels of hiaqua, and to give them in return only tough scraps of dried elk-meat and salmon. When men are shabby, mean, and grasping, they feel reproached for their grovelling lives by the unearthliness of nature's beautiful objects, and they hate flowers, and sunsets, mountains, and the quiet stars of heaven.
"Nevertheless," continued Hamitchou, "this wise old fool of my legend went on stalking elk along the sides of Tacoma, ever dreaming of wealth. And at last, as he was hunting near the snows one day, one very clear and beautiful day of late summer, when sunlight was magically disclosing far distances, and making all nature supernaturally visible and proximate, Tamanoüs began to work in the soul of the miser.
"'Are you brave,' whispered Tamanoüs in the strange, ringing, dull, silent thunder-tones of a demon voice. 'Dare you go to the caves where my treasures are hid?'
"'I dare,' said the miser.
"He did not know that his lips had syllabled a reply. He did not even hear his own words. But all the place had become suddenly vocal with echoes. The great rock against which he leaned crashed forth, 'I dare.' Then all along through the forest, dashing from tree to tree and lost at last among the murmuring of breeze-shaken leaves, went careering his answer, taken up and repeated scornfully, 'I dare.' And after a silence, while the daring one trembled and would gladly have ventured to shout, for the companionship of his own voice, there came across from the vast snow wall of Tacoma a tone like the muffled, threatening plunge of an avalanche into a chasm, 'I dare.'
"'You dare,' said Tamanoüs, enveloping him with a dread sense of an unseen, supernatural presence; 'you pray for wealth of hiaqua. Listen!'
"This injunction was hardly needed; the miser was listening with dull eyes kindled and starting. He was listening with every rusty hair separating from its unkempt mattedness, and outstanding upright, a caricature of an aureole.
"'Listen,' said Tamanoüs, in the noonday hush. And then Tamanoüs vouchsafed at last the great secret of the hiaqua mines, while in terror near to death the miser heard, and every word of guidance toward the hidden treasure of the mountains seared itself into his soul ineffaceably.
"Silence came again more terrible now than the voice of Tamanoüs—silence under the shadow of the great cliff—silence deepening down the forest vistas—silence filling the void up to the snows of Tacoma. All life and motion seemed paralyzed. At last Skai-ki, the Blue-Jay, the wise bird, foe to magic, sang cheerily overhead. Her song seemed to refresh again the honest laws of nature. The buzz of life stirred everywhere again, and the inspired miser rose and hastened home to prepare for his work.
"When Tamanoüs has put a great thought in a man's brain, has whispered him a great discovery within his power, or hinted at a great crime, that spiteful demon does not likewise suggest the means of accomplishment.
"The miser, therefore, must call upon his own skill to devise proper tools, and upon his own judgment to fix upon the most fitting time for carrying out his quest. Sending his squaw out to the kamas prairie, under pretence that now was the season for her to gather their winter store of that sickish-sweet esculent root, and that she might not have her squaw's curiosity aroused by seeing him at strange work, he began his preparations. He took a pair of enormous elk-horns, and fashioned from each horn a two-pronged pick or spade, by removing all the antlers except the two topmost. He packed a good supply of kippered salmon, and filled his pouch with kinni kinnick for smoking in his black stone pipe. With his bow and arrows and his two elk-horn picks wrapped in buckskin hung at his back, he started just before sunset, as if for a long hunt. His old, faithful, maltreated, blanketless, vermilionless squaw, returning with baskets full of kamas, saw him disappearing moodily down the trail.
"All that night, all the day following, he moved on noiselessly by paths he knew. He hastened on, unnoticing outward objects, as one with a controlling purpose hastens. Elk and deer, bounding through the trees, passed him, but he tarried not. At night he camped just below the snows of Tacoma. He was weary, weary, and chill night-airs blowing down from the summit almost froze him. He dared not take his fire-sticks, and, placing one perpendicular upon a little hollow on the flat side of the other, twirl the upright stick rapidly between his palms until the charred spot kindled and lighted his 'tipsoo,' his dry, tindery wool of inner bark. A fire, gleaming high upon the mountain-side, might be a beacon to draw thither any night-wandering savage to watch in ambush, and learn the path toward the mines of hiaqua. So he drowsed chilly and fireless, awakened often by dread sounds of crashing and rumbling among the chasms of Tacoma. He desponded bitterly, almost ready to abandon his quest, almost doubting whether he had in truth received a revelation, whether his interview with Tamanoüs had not been a dream, and finally whether all the hiaqua in the world was worth this toil and anxiety. Fortunate is the sage who at such a point turns back and buys his experience without worse befalling him.
"Past midnight he suddenly was startled from his drowse, and sat bolt upright in terror. A light. Was there another searcher in the forest, and a bolder than he? That flame just glimmering over the tree-tops, was it a camp-fire of friend or foe? Had Tamanoüs been revealing to another the great secret? No, smiled the miser, his eyes fairly open, and discovering that the new light was the moon. He had been waiting for her illumination of paths heretofore untrodden by mortal. She did not show her full, round jolly face, but turned it askance as if she hardly liked to be implicated in this night's transaction.
"However, it was light he wanted, not sympathy, and he started up at once to climb over the dim snows. The surface was packed by the night's frost, and his moccasins gave him firm hold; yet he travelled but slowly, and could not always save himself from a glissade backwards, and a bruise upon some projecting knob or crag. Sometimes, upright fronts of ice diverted him for long circuits, or a broken wall of cold cliff arose, which he must surmount painfully. Once or twice he stuck fast in a crevice, and hardly drew himself out by placing his bundle of picks across the crack. As he plodded and floundered thus deviously and toilsomely upward, at last the wasted moon gan pale overhead, and under foot the snow grew rosy with coming dawn. The dim world about the mountain's base displayed something of its vast detail. He could see, more positively than by moonlight, the far-reaching arteries of mist marking the organism of Whulge beneath; and what had been but a black chaos now revealed itself into the Alpine forest whence he had come.
"But he troubled himself little with staring about; up he looked, for the summit was at hand. To win that summit was wellnigh the attainment of his hopes, if Tamanoüs were true; and that, with the flush of morning ardor upon him, he could not doubt. There, in a spot Tamanoüs had revealed to him, was hiaqua—hiaqua that should make him the richest and greatest of all the Squallyamish.
"The chill before sunrise was upon him as he reached the last curve of the dome. Sunrise and he struck the summit together. Together sunrise and he looked over the glacis. They saw within a great hollow all covered with the whitest of snow, save at the centre, where a black lake lay deep in a well of purple rock.
"At the eastern end of this lake was a small, irregular plain of snow, marked by three stones like monuments. Towards these the miser sprang rapidly, with full sunshine streaming after him over the snows.
"The first monument he examined with keen looks. It was tall as a giant man, and its top was fashioned into the grotesque likeness of a salmon's head. He turned from this to inspect the second. It was of similar height, but bore at its apex an object in shape like the regular flame of a torch. As he approached, he presently discovered that this was an image of the kamas-bulb in stone. These two semblances of prime necessities of Indian life delayed him but an instant,