BOAS] TSIMSHIAN MYTHS 159 



Early the next morning she arose and lighted the fire. The tall 

 young man asked the girl, "Why are you staying here?" The girl 

 said, "We are waiting for the salmon to come up the brook, then we 

 intend to club them." He replied, "Tell your mother to bring down 

 nettles, as many as she can find." 



The girl told her mother, who went quickly to gather nettles. 

 After she had tied them into bundles, she carried them down. The 

 young man spread out the nettles in the hut. Then he sharpened a 

 piece of hard wood and spht the nettles. He dried them in the sun; 

 and when they were dry, he peeled off the outer bark. On the fol- 

 lowing day he dried them again. He took three dried ribs of 

 mountain goats, used them as knives to peel off the outer bark until 

 the fiber remained. After the young man had peeled all the nettles, 

 he showed his mother-in-law how to spin and make thread out of 

 them. He spread the fiber on his right thigh with the thumb of his 

 right hand, and he held the nettle fiber in his left hand with 

 three fingers. Then he worked on, pushing the fiber toward his 

 knee, and drawing it again back toward his body. Thus he twisted 

 the fibers into a thread. 



Now the widow had learned it, and worked all night spinning, 

 day by day, and night by night, until she had used up all the fiber 

 of the nettles. Then the young man made a mesh-stick, four fingers 

 wide, and as long as the palm of the hand, out of hard wood, and he 

 began to net; and in three days he had used up all the thread, and 

 his net was twenty fathoms long and twenty meshes wide. 



Then he told his mother-in-law to make a good cedar-bark line of 

 three cords, twenty-six fathoms longer than the net; and he took 

 dry red cedar and carved floats out of it. 1 



When the young man had finished the net, he went out in the 

 night with his wife and began to fish. His net was full of salmon; 

 and when he came home early in the morning, his canoe was full of 

 silver salmon. The widow cut them all while they slept, and before 

 evening her son-in-law and her daughter awoke. After they had 

 taken their evening meal, they made ready to go out fishing again, 

 and they came home early, with their canoe full of silver salmon. 

 He smoked the salmon, and enlarged his mother-in-law's hut and 

 made it into a large house for smoking sahnon, and the large house 

 was full of dried salmon. 



Then he built another large smoking-house, and it also was soon 

 filled. Then they tied the salmon into bundles. He built a third 

 house, and they stored in it the bundles of dried salmon. 2 When the 

 large house was full of bundles of dried salmon, and the salmon were 

 hanging in the other two houses, the man said to his wife, "I am 



1 There were no lines at the bottom of the old nets. They had only top lines.— Henry W. Tate. 

 - There were twoscore dried salmon in one bundle. In one bundle of animal skins are only ten.— Henkv 

 W. Tate. 



