Tlingit

LONG ago, a man’s wife was stolen from him. He cared for her so much he thought he would follow her. So he began to walk. He thought he was walking along the beach, but he was following a wide trail through the woods. He walked on for a long time with his head bent down, until he saw smoke ahead. When he came near he saw a woman tanning a skin. He showed her a necklace he had made. He said, “I will give you this string if you will tell me where my wife is.”

The woman said, “She is over at the next camp.”

So he at last reached his wife and stayed there a long time.

Now the people of this village wanted to kill him. They kindled a fire and began to drag him to it. He said, “Oh, how glad I am! I want to die.” Then they stopped and began to drag him toward the water. The man said he was afraid of water, so they threw him in. He came up in the middle of the lake.

People said, “See him. He is looking at us.” The man laughed. He said, “The water is just where I like to be.” He said this because he was a good swimmer and there was much rain in his country. He stayed in the water all the time he remained in that country.

Now all this while the man and his wife had really been in the sky. Now they wanted to get down. They started back to the house of a certain woman. She was the spider. The house was her web. The woman put them into a web and began to lower them to the earth. Before they started, the woman said, “If you get caught on anything, jerk backward and forward until the web comes loose.” She thought they might get caught on the edges of the clouds. So the man and his wife reached the earth safely and the web was drawn up into the sky.