Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, vol 4 | Page 7

had feared this. That woman is
a sister of the goblins. She wishes to destroy men."
At this the elder brother was afraid, lest she should cast a spell on him,
and rowing up the river for a distance he came upon her as she was
bathing and shot at her. The arrow seemed to strike, for there was a
flutter of feathers and the woman flew away as a partridge. But the
younger did not forget the good she had done and sought her in the
wood, where for many days they played together as of old.
"I do not blame your father: it is an affair of old, this hate he bears me,"
she said. "He will choose a wife for you soon, but do not marry her,
else all will come to an end for you." The man could not wed the witch,
and he might not disobey his father, in spite of this adjuration; so when
the old man said to him, "I have a wife for you, my son," he answered,
"It is well."
They brought the bride to the village, and for four days the wedding-
dance was held, with a feast that lasted four days more. Then said the
young man, "Now comes the end," and lying down on a bear-skin he
sighed a few times and his spirit ascended to the Ghosts' road--the
milky way. The father shook his head, for he knew that this was the
witch's work, and, liking the place no longer, he went away and the
tribe was scattered.

THE MARRIAGE OF MOUNT KATAHDIN
An Indian girl gathering berries on the side of Mount Katahdin looked
up at its peak, rosy in the afternoon light, and sighed, "I wish that I had
a husband. If Katahdin were a man he might marry me." Her
companions laughed at this quaint conceit, and, filled with confusion at
being overheard, she climbed higher up the slope and was lost to sight.
For three years her tribe lost sight of her; then she came back with a
child in her arms a beautiful boy with brows of stone. The boy had
wonderful power: he had only to point at a moose or a duck or a bear,
and it fell dead, so that the tribe never wanted food. For he was the son
of the Indian girl and the spirit of the mountain, who had commanded

her not to reveal the boy's paternity. Through years she held silence on
this point, holding in contempt, like other Indians, the prying inquiries
of gossips and the teasing of young people, and knowing that Katahdin
had designed the child for the founder of a mighty race, with the sinews
of the very mountains in its frame, that should fill and rule the earth.
Yet, one day, in anger at some slight, the mother spoke: "Fools! Wasps
who sting the fingers that pick you from the water! Why do you
torment me about what you might all see? Look at the boy's face --his
brows: in them do you not see Katahdin? Now you have brought the
curse upon yourselves, for you shall hunt your own venison from this
time forth." Leading the child by the hand she turned toward the
mountain and went out from their sight. And since then the Indians
who could not hold their tongues, and who might otherwise have been
great, have dwindled to a little people.

THE MOOSE OF MOUNT KINEO
Eastern traditions concerning Hiawatha differ in many respects from
those of the West. In the East he is known as Glooskap, god of the
Passamaquoddies, and his marks are left in many places in the maritime
provinces and Maine. It was he who gave names to things, created men,
filled them with life, and moved their wonder with storms. He lived on
the rocky height of Blomidon, at the entrance to Minas Basin, Nova
Scotia, and the agates to be found along its foot are jewels that he made
for his grandmother's necklace, when he restored her youth. He threw
up a ridge between Fort Cumberland and Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, that
he might cross, dry shod, the lake made by the beavers when they
dammed the strait at Blomidon, but he afterward killed the beavers, and
breaking down their dam he let the lake flow into the sea, and went
southward on a hunting tour. At Mount Desert he killed a moose,
whose bones he flung to the ground at Bar Harbor, where they are still
to be seen, turned to stone, while across the bay he threw the entrails,
and they, too, are visible as rocks, dented with his arrow-points. Mount
Kineo was anciently a cow moose of colossal size that he slew and
turned into a