Moldy-forehead

[Told by Tom Stevens, chief of Those-born-at-House-point]

During a famine a child asked his mother for something to eat. Then his mother cut off the upper part of a dog salmon for him, and he thought it was not enough. He said it was too small and began to cry.

After he had cried for a while he went out with it. He chewed it up and put it into a swampy place by the beach. Then the dog salmon swelled up there, and there was a great quantity of it. He was sorry at having lost it. Then he began to cry.

He went out to play with the children. One day there was such a great quantity of salmon eggs about that he sat down and, inside of his blanket, put them into his mouth. Then a child looked at him and shouted, “Moldy-forehead is eating our excrement.”

Then he went thither and did as he was directed; and, after he came away, the eye of the chief’s son became diseased. Then the one who was part rock told him to look around in the place where he had eaten salmon, and when he did so he found the hard part surrounding the salmon’s eye with the stick stuck through it. He put it into the fire; and when he came back not the least thing was ailing the one whose eye had been diseased. It had become well. The souls of the Salmon people were what came into the creeks there.

Then the person who was half rock said to him: “When you become hungry, go thither. Take care of the bones. Put all into the fire.” And, when he became weak from hunger, he went to it as directed, took salmon, made a fire for them, and ate them there. One day the rib of some one became diseased. Then he again searched there. He found a rib. That he also burned. When he returned the sick person had become well.

Then he did so, and when he felt strange (curious) about it, he looked in. His head got stuck there. He barely could pull it away. His face was half covered with eggs. He scraped them off with his fingers. And he pulled out the hemlock bough. The eggs were thick on it. Then he went to the end of the town and ate them at the creek.

Then it was fine weather, and they pulled off a pole from inside the edges of the canoe and shook the sky with it. At once rain began to fall. Those in the canoe were happy. They prepared themselves. They shook their insides with anger, because they were going to fight the fort. That [the fort] was a fish trap, they say. At once they started up in a crowd.

He recognized his mother and swam ashore in front of her. Then his mother tried to club him, and he escaped into the creek. And when he did the same thing again he let his mother club him to death.

They moved away, and the next year they came to the same place to get salmon. When the salmon came again and ran up a shining one was on top. Then he told them not to spear it, but it was the very one they tried to spear. By and by he made a spear for himself and speared it. When he had pulled it ashore, and the salmon died, he, too, died. He did not know that it was his own soul.

Here the story ends.

As might have been expected, this story was a very popular one along the salmon-frequented North Pacific coast, and several different versions of it have been already recorded. An excellent one was obtained by myself in English from an old Kaigani, derived from the Tlingit, among whom it appears to have originated. This will be found in volume V of the Memoirs of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, part I, pages 243 to 245. Apart from linguistics, the story is interesting from the point of view of Indian psychology. It was related by the present chief of Those-born-at-House-point (Na-iku′n qe′ig̣awa-i), once the leading family of Rose Spit and Cape Ball, on the eastern coast of Graham island.

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