'Don't eat that,' whispered his wife, 'if you do, you will never get
back again'; and he listened to her and did not eat it.
Then his wife said again:
'It is not good for you to stay here. Let us depart at once,' and they
hastened to the edge of the water and got into the canoe, which is
called the Ghost's Canoe, and is the only one on the lake. They were
soon across and they landed at the flat stone where the young man had
stood when he was shouting, and the name of that stone is the Ghost's
Rock. Down they went along the road that he had come, and on the second
night they reached the youth's house.
[Illustration: THE TLINGIT CHIEF FINDS HIS WIFE IS ILL.]
'Stay here,' he said, 'and I will go in and tell my father.' So he
entered and said to his father:
'I have brought my wife back.'
'Well, why don't you bring her in?' asked the chief, and he took a fur
robe and laid it on top of a mat for her to sit on. After that the young
man led his wife into the house, but the people inside could not see her
enter, but only her husband; yet when he came quite close, they noticed
a deep shadow behind him. The young man bade his wife sit down on the
mat they had prepared for her, and a robe of marten skins was placed
over her shoulders, and it hung upon her as if she had been a real woman
and not a ghost. Then they put food before her, and, as she ate, they
beheld her arms, and the spoon moving up and down. But the shadow of her
hands they did not see, and it seemed strange to them.
* * * * *
Now from henceforth the young man and his wife always went everywhere
together; whether he was hunting or fishing, the shadow always followed
him, and he begged to have his bed made where they had first seated
themselves, instead of in the room where he had slept before. And this
the people in the house did gladly, for joy at having him back.
In the day, if they happened not to be away hunting or fishing, the wife
was so quiet that no one would have guessed she was there, but during
the night she would play games with her husband and talk to him, so that
the others could hear her voice. At her first coming the chief felt
silent and awkward, but after a while he grew accustomed to her and
would pretend to be angry and called out: 'You had better get up now,
after keeping everyone awake all night with your games,' and they could
hear the shadow laugh in answer, and knew it was the laugh of the dead
woman.
Thus things went on for some time, and they might have gone on longer,
had not a cousin of the dead girl's who had wanted to marry her before
she married the chief's son become jealous when he found that her
husband had brought her back from across the lake. And he spied upon
her, and listened to her when she was talking, hoping for a chance to
work her some ill. At last the chance came, as it commonly does, and it
was in this wise:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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