452 THE BELLA COOLA INDIANS

old woman saw that there was blood where he had been sitting. She
pointed this out to her son.

“See what you have done to your wife,” she said. ‘Look at the
blood.”

The husband was puzzled, but concluded that in some manner his wife
had escaped so there was nothing more to be done about the matter.

Presently he went to bed and began to fondle Kina’o-, believing all
the time that it was his wife.

“Don’t touch me,” Kina’o: said. “I am in too much pain.”

He desisted and went to sleep. Then Kiza’o- got up, cut off the head
of his brother-in-law and fled away with it. Only the murdered man’s
sister saw him and cried out that she had known all evening that it
wasaman. Relatives of the victim followed, but Kina’o- eluded them,
finally returning home with the corpse of his sister and the head of her
husband.

The kinsmen of the murdered man determined on revenge. Several
months later, they despatched a war-party which sacked Kina’o-’s village,
killing him and all his people except one girl whom they carried off as a
slave. After living in bondage for several months, she became pregnant.
In due course she went alone to the woods and delivered herself without
assistance; the child was a boy. The mother knew that, if his sex were
known, he would be killed through fear that if allowed to grow up he
would avenge his mother’s wrongs;® so she bound up her son’s penis in a
curve to resemble the organs of a girl. On returning to the village, she
was asked if the child were a daughter, and she replied that it was. Sev-
eral women looked at the infant, but none of them noticed the deception,
nor did they observe it on future occasions when they helped the mother
wash her child.

The woman had determined that her son should slay those who had
enslaved her. Accordingly, she used to wash him in the river at dawn.

“Be bold,” she would say as she did so. ‘You must revenge your-
self on those who have wronged your mother.”

Thanks to this washing, the boy gained so much strength that, when
about ten or twelve years of age, he obtained supernatural power from
sistutt. One day he found some excuse to send his mother and her friends
out of the village, then used his sisiut# ability to cause a landslide from a
precipitous mountain behind the town. All the houses were swept away
and every inhabitant killed except those whom he had sent away. Thus
did he revenge his mother.

®No Bella Coola had ever heard of the killing of a slave’s son at birth to prevent
danger to his mother’s owners. It is assumed that this may have occurrred in
the distant past.