188 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [bull. :J9 



We have a village there named Transparent-village (KanA'xA- 

 dak-an). You must come and stay with us." The man said that 

 he was making a canoe and had to finish it, but she replied, ' 'Your 

 nephews are coming over, and they will finish your canoe for you." 



After the food that his sister had" brought him had given out she 

 came to him again with more and said, "I have come after you now. 

 Bring your little ones and come along. I see that you are having 

 a hard time with them." 



So her brother prepared to go. Before he started he got some 

 blue hellebore (s'.ikc), which he soaked in water to make it very 

 strong and bitter, and finally his sister's boys came, fine-looking 

 young men who were j^eculiar only in having very long braids of 

 hair hanging down their backs. In reality these were their tails. 

 He showed them where his canoe was so that they could go to work 

 on it, and, after they had completed it roughly, they pulled it down 

 for him. 



Then the man started ofi^ with his family, and, sure enough, when 

 he rounded the point what appeared to him like a fine village lay 

 there. The people came to meet them, but his sister said, ' 'Don't 

 stay right in the village. Stay here, a little distance away." 



The people of that place were very good to him and gave him all 

 the halibut he wanted, but he always had the blue hellebore by 

 him to keep from being injiu'iously aft'ected. They were also in the 

 habit of singing a cradle song for his youngest child which went this 

 way, "The tail is growing. The tail is growing." Then he exam- 

 ined the child, and in fact a tail was really growing upon it, so he 

 chopped it off. 



Finally the man's sister told him that he was staying there a little 

 too long, and he started back toward his village. As he went 

 he looked back, and there was nothing to be seen but land-otter 

 holes. Before they had a])])eared like ])ainted houses. Then he 

 returned to his own place with all kinds of food given him by the 

 land otters. 



46. THE LAND-OTTERS' CAPTIVE 



Several persons once went out from Sitka together, when their 

 canoe upset and all were drowned except a man of the KiksA'di. 

 A canoe came to this man, and he thought that it contained his 

 friends, but they were really land otters. They started southward 

 with him and kept going farther and farther, until they had passed 

 clear round the Queen Charlotte islands. At every place where 

 they stopped they took in a female land otter. All this time they 

 kept a mat made out of the broad part of a piece of kelp, over the 

 man they had capturetl until at length they arrived at a place they 

 called Rainy-village (Si'wu-a'ni). 



