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Updated: June 1, 2025
The rising tide was unbeaching the canoe, and as Maarda stepped in and the klootchman slipped astern, it drifted afloat. "Kla-how-ya," nodded the klootchman as she dipped her paddle-blade in exquisite silence. "Kla-how-ya," smiled Maarda.
Great had been the "run," and the sockeye season was almost over. For that reason I wondered many times why my old friend, the klootchman, had failed to make one of the fishing fleet. She was an indefatigable workwoman, rivalling her husband as an expert catcher, and all the year through she talked of little else but the coming run.
The little flower paled, the small face grew smaller, the tiny hands tinier; and one morning, when the birds awoke in the forests of the Squamish, the eyes of the little Tenas Klootchman remained closed.
"Mine was a Tenas Klootchman, too," she said. "Then I will go to her, and be her mother, wherever she is, in the Spirit Islands they tell us of," said the woman. "We will be but exchanging our babies, after all." When morning dawned, the woman did not awake.
So he and his little klootchman, about as big as a child of ten, took us off. I see the Indians often bury them between two bodies of water, and have wondered if this had any significance to them. I have noticed, too, that their burial-places have always wild and beautiful surroundings. At this place, the blue blankets over the graves waved in the wind, like the wings of some great bird.
The Indian replied over his shoulder. "The white Klootchman go to see the beaver! Beaver there!" He jerked his head towards a creek now opening out on the further shore, and a look of impatience came on Ainley's face.
"I not wait me. I just come to fetch Maarda; she been city; she come soon now." But she left her "working" attitude and curled like a schoolgirl in the bow of the canoe, her elbows resting on her paddle which she had flung across the gunwales. "I have missed you, klootchman; you have not been to see me for three moons, and you have not fished or been at the canneries," I remarked. "No," she said.
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