'Yes, let us cook it,' answered the old woman, and after they had eaten
it she bade the chief's wife go back to the beach and try to find
something else. This time the girl brought in a fish called a sculpin,
and it was cooked also; but while they were eating it the chief's wife
heard the noise of boys shouting, though she could see no one.
'Take the tray with the food out to that hole,' said the old woman, and
as the chief's wife did so she beheld many hands sticking up out of the
ground. She placed the tray in the hands, and waited as it disappeared.
In a moment it rose to the surface again, with two fine fox skins on it,
which she carried back to the old woman.
'Make yourself some robes out of them,' said she, and the girl did so.
When she was dressed, the old woman spoke to her again, and said:
'Your father and mother live in a salmon creek, a little way along the
beach. It might be well for you to go and pay them a visit.' So the girl
went, and after a time she saw her father out in a canoe spearing
salmon, and her mother was with him. The girl ran quickly down to the
water's edge in order to meet them, but when her father saw her he cried
out:
'Here comes a fox; where are my bow and arrows?' And his daughter heard
him and ran as fast as she could to the woods.
After a while she stopped running, for she knew she was safe, and then
she made her way to the old woman.
'Why are you crying? Did you not see your father?'
'Yes, and he took me for a fox.'
'Why, what else do you think you are?' asked the old woman in surprise.
'But return at once to your father who will want to kill you; and be
sure you let him do it.'
'Very well, I will do your bidding,' answered the girl, though the order
seemed strange to her.
The next day the girl went down to the beach and saw her father fishing
still closer to the shore.
'Why, here is that big fox again,' cried he, and she did not move, but
waited while he fitted an arrow to his bow and shot her in the heart.
Then his wife got out of the canoe and began to skin the fox, and as she
did so she found something on its foreleg which made her start.
'Surely that is my daughter's bracelet,' said she. 'Yet that is not
possible!' And she continued her work. By and by she came to the throat,
and there lay a necklace. 'Surely that is my daughter's necklace,' she
repeated, and then she called to her husband, saying:
'I found our daughter's necklace and bracelet in this skin. Something
that we know not of must have turned her into a fox.' And they both
cried, for they remembered how the fox had run to meet them instead of
going away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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