'How lucky I am!' she said to herself; 'it was well indeed that I did
not return with the others,' and she broke off a piece of salmon and
tried to eat it, but she could not.
'What is the matter with me?' she wondered. 'I wish my aunt were here,'
and she felt rather frightened. And the next day she grew more
frightened still, for she found out that the birds were spirits, and it
was they who were preventing her from eating food, so that she might
become a great shaman or medicine-man. After a little while her eyes
were opened, and she understood many things she had never guessed at,
and the spirit-birds she had seen took possession of her, and others
came from the woods and the sea, and sang to her.
At first she went two or three times every day to visit the buried
canoes and to dig for roots, but she quickly gave that up, for she had
nothing with which to sharpen the sticks she used instead of spades; and
besides, what was the use of digging for roots if you could not eat
them? Meanwhile, in the village the girl's aunt mourned for her, as she
felt sure Djun must by this time be dead of hunger.
* * * * *
'I am very lonely: I wish some of my old friends would come to see me,'
thought Djun when she had been living by herself for several months, and
the next morning a canoe appeared in sight, and in it were seated some
people whom she knew. Then Djun was happy indeed, and she bade them
follow her to the brush-house, and gave them food out of the canoes; for
two or three days they stayed, digging for roots and for anything else
they could get, and at the end of the time Djun said to them:
'It is well that you should go again, but be careful not to take with
you any of the food that I have given you. Tell my friends that I am
alive, and beg my aunt to come and visit me.'
So the people of the canoe returned to the village, and told such tales
of the food they had received from Djun that all the townsfolk hastened
to get into their canoes and paddled straight off to the place where she
was living. When they drew near enough to see the brush-house, they
beheld it surrounded by thousands of birds that seemed to stretch right
upwards from the earth to the sky. They also heard the shaman's voice
and the sound of singing, but as soon as they approached closer to the
brush-house, the birds flew away.
After that the shaman went out to meet them, and she asked:
'Where is my aunt? I want her;' and when her aunt came Djun gave her
everything that was stored in one of her buried canoes, and then she
said:
'I should like two of the women to stay with me and help me with my
singing,' and one after another the chief women of the tribe, with their
faces newly painted, rose up in the canoes; but she would have none of
them, and chose two girls who were orphans like herself, and had been
treated very badly by their kinsfolk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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