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.
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