Once upon a time there lived in Alaska a chief of the Tlingit tribe who had one son. When the boy grew to be a man, he saw a girl who seemed to him prettier and cleverer than any other girl of the tribe, and his heart went out to her, and he told his father. Then the chief spoke to the father and the mother of the girl, and they agreed to give her to the young man for a wife. So the two were married, and for a few months all went well with them and they were very happy. But one day the husband came home from hunting and found his wife sitting crouched over the fire--her eyes dull and her head heavy. 'You are ill,' he said, 'I will go for the shaman,' but the girl answered: 'No, not now. I will sleep, and in the morning the pains will have gone from me.' But in the morning she was dead, and the young man grieved bitterly and would eat nothing, and he lay awake all that night thinking of his wife, and the next night also. 'Perhaps if I went out into the forest and walked till I was tired, I might sleep and forget my pain,' thought he. But, after all, he could not bear to leave the house while his dead wife was in it, so he waited till her body was taken away that evening for burial. Then, very early next morning, he put on his leggings and set off into the forest and walked through that day and the following night. Sunrise on the second morning found him in a wide valley covered with thick trees. Before him stretched a plain which had once been full of water, but it was now dried up. He paused for a moment and looked about him, and as he looked he seemed to hear voices speaking a long way off. But he could see nobody, and walked on again till he beheld a light shining through the branches of the trees and noticed a flat stone on the edge of a lake. Here the road stopped; for it was the death road along which he had come, though he did not know it. The lake was narrow, and on the other side were houses and people going in and out of them. 'Come over and fetch me,' he shouted, but nobody heard him, though he cried till he was hoarse. 'It is very odd that nobody hears me,' whispered the youth after he had shouted for some time longer; and at that minute a person standing at the door of one of the houses across the lake cried out: 'Someone is shouting'; for they could hear him when he whispered, but not when he made a great noise. 'It is somebody who has come from dreamland,' continued the voice. 'Let a canoe go and bring him over.' So a canoe shot out from the shore, and the young man got into it and was paddled across, and as soon as he stepped out he saw his dead wife. Joy rushed into his heart at the sight of her; her eyes were red as though she had been crying; and he held out his hands. As he did so the people in the house said to him: 'You must have come from far; sit down, and we will give you food,' and they spread food before him, at which he felt glad, for he was hungry.