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  In
  The
  Time
  That
  Was

  Dedicated
  to
  _Ah-Koo_

  Done into English
  by
  J. Frederic Thorne
  (_Kitchakahaech_)

  Illustrated
  by
  Judson T. Sergeant
  (_To-u-sucka_)

  Seattle,
  Washington,
  U. S. A.

  BEING THE FIRST
  volume _of_ a series
  of Legends _of_ the tribe
  of Alaskan Indians
  known as the Chilkats--_of_
  the Klingats
  _As told by Zachook the "Bear"
  to Kitchakahaech the "Raven"_

[Illustration]




_In the Time That Was_

"And There Was Light."


Zachook of the Chilkats told me these tales of The Time That Was.
But before the telling, he of the Northland and I of the Southland
had travelled many a mile with dog-team, snowshoes, and canoe.

If the stories suffer in the telling, as suffer they must afar from
that wondrous Alaskan background of mountain and forest, glacier
and river, wrenched from the setting of campfires and trail, and
divorced from the soft gutturals and halting throat notes in which
they have been handed down from generation to generation of Chilkat
and Chilkoot, blame not Zachook, who told them to me, and forbear
to blame me who tell them to you as best I may in this stiff
English tongue. They were many months in the telling and many weary
miles have I had to carry them in my memory pack.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had lost count of the hours, lost count of the days that at best
are marked by little change between darkness and dawn in the
Northland winter, until I knew not how long I had lain there in my
blanket of snow, waiting for the lingering feet of that dawdler,
Death, to put an end to my sufferings.

Some hours, or days, or years before I had been pushing along the
trail to the coast, thinking little where I placed my feet and much
of the eating that lay at Dalton Post House; and of other things
thousands of miles from this bleak waste, where men exist in the
hope of ultimate living, with kaleidoscope death by their side;
other things that had to do with women's faces, bills of fare from
which bacon and beans were rigidly excluded, and comforts of the
flesh that some day I again might enjoy.

Then, as if to mock me, teach me the folly of allowing even my
thoughts to wander from her cold face, the Northland meted swift
punishment. The packed snow of the trail beneath my feet gave way,
there was a sharp click of steel meeting steel, and a shooting pain
that ran from heel to head. For a moment I was sick and giddy from
the shock and sudden pain, then, loosening the pack from my
shoulders, fell to digging the snow with my mittened hands away
from what, even before I uncovered it, I knew to be a bear trap
that had bitten deep into my ankle and held it in vise clutch.
Roundly I cursed at the worse than fool who had set bear trap in
man trail, as I tore and tugged to free myself. As well might I
have tried to wrench apart the jaws of its intended victim.

Weakened at last by my efforts and the excruciating pain I lay back
upon the snow. A short rest, and again I pulled feebly at the steel
teeth, until my hands were bleeding and my brain swirling.

How long I struggled blindly, viciously, like a trapped beaver, I
do not know, though I have an indistinct memory of reaching for my
knife to emulate his sometime method of escape. But with the first
flakes of falling snow came a delicious, contentful langour,
deadening the pain, soothing the weariness of my muscles, calming
the tempest of my thoughts and fears, and lulling me gently to
sleep to the music of an old song crooned by the breeze among the
trees.

When I awoke it was with that queer feeling of foreign surroundings
we sometimes experience, and the snow, the forest, the pain in my
leg, my own being, were as strange as the crackling fire, the warm
blanket that wrapped me, and the Indian who bent over me smiling
into my half opened eyes.

So were our trails joined and made one