478 PICTURE-WRITING OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS. 
weather was calm and the sea smooth. One of these killers, or blackfish, a species 
of porpoise, kept alongside of a canoe, and the young men amused themselves by 
throwing stones from the canoe ballast and hitting the fin of the killer. After 
some pretty hard blows from these rocks the creature made for the shore, where it 
grounded on the beach. Soon a smoke was seen, and their curiosity prompted them 
to ascertain the cause, but when they reached the shore they discovered, to their 
surprise, that if was a large canoe, and not the Skana that was in the beach, and 
that a man was on shore cooking some food. He asked them why they threw stones 
at his canoe. ‘You have broken it,’ he said, ‘and now go into the woods and get 
some cedar withes and mend it.’ They did so, and when they had finished the 
man said, ‘Turn you backs to the water and cover your heads with your skin 
blankets, and don’t look till I call you.’ They did so, and heard the canoe grate on 
the beach as it was hated down into the surf. Then the man said, ‘Look, now.’ They 
looked, but when it came to the second breaker it went under and presently came 
up outside of the breaker a killer and not a canoe, and the man or demon was in its 
belly. This allegory is common among all the tribes on the Northwest Coast, and 
even with the interior tribes with whom the salmon takes the place of the orca, 
which never ascends the fresh-water rivers. The Chileat and other tribes of Alaska 
carve figures of salmon, inside of which is the full length figure of a nude Indian. 
* * * Casual observers without inquiry will at once pronounce it to be Jonah in 
the fish’s belly, but the allegory is of ancient origin, far antedating the advent of the 
white man or the teachings of the missionary. 
Fic. 665.—Bear-Mother. Haida. 
The same author, Pl. xLrx, gives an explanation of Fig. 665, which 
is a copy of a Haida slate carving, representing the ‘‘ Bear-Mother.” 
The Haida version of the myth is as follows: 
A number of Indian squaws were in the woods gathering berries when one of them, 
the daughter of a chief, spoke in terms of ridicule of the whole bear species. The 
bears descended on them and killed all but the chief’s daughter, whom the king of 
the bears took to wife. She bore him a child half human and half bear. The cary- 
ing represents the agony of the mother in suckling this rough and uncouth offspring. 
One day a party of Indian bear hunters discovered her up a tree and were about to 
kill her, thinking her a bear, but she made them understand that she was human. 
They took her home and she afterwards became the progenitor of all Indians belong- 
ing to the bear totem, They believe that the bear are men transformed for the time 
being. This carving was made by Skaows-ke’ay, a Haida. Cat. No. 73117, U.S. Nat. 
Museum. Skidegate village, Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. Collected 
by James G. Swan. 
