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back and weep as you give yourself up. The Cree never kill small boys
like you.” The boy returned weeping, and surrendered himself to the
leading Cree, who planted a hat on his head to show possession and sent
him on to the camp. The hunter escaped, but the Cree carried away his
wife and brother-in-law, whom they secured each night with cords, fasten-
ing one end to the neck and hair of each captive, and the other to a warrior’s
waist. After they had travelled three or four days, the girl remembered
that her dream-guardian was the beaver, and that she carried a small piece
of flint like a beaver’s tooth under her belt. That night, when the Cree
were sound asleep, she cut the cords with the knife. The two children
then fled to the woods, and concealed themselves in the leafy branches of a
tall tree. The Cree sent out a bird, one of their dream-guardians, to look
for them. It settled on top of the tree and called ka ka ka: but the girl,
who had greater medicine-power than the Cree, threw a stick and killed it.
All day the Cree searched vainly; one man even gazed right into the tree
where the children were hidden without seeing them. When night came,
and their enemies had returned to camp, the girl and boy descended from the
tree and fled towards Parsnip river. Now when the girl’s husband returned
to his camp after the departure of the Cree an eagle, his dream-guardian,
circled over his head and said to him: “In nine or ten days your wife will
pass by here.” He, therefore, killed three beaver and built two canoes of
spruce bark. One canoe and two of the beaver he left on the river bank for
his wife and her brother; in the other canoe, with one beaver, he returned
to his home. Within ten days, as the eagle had foretold, the girl and her
brother returned, found the canoe and the two beaver, and regained their
people.

A Sekani hunter and his aged mother went to Carp lake to fish, and
other Sekani intended to follow them. Three families of mixed Cree and
Beaver came to the same lake. The eldest Cree, named Usdjenta, had
three wives, one of them a Sekani woman named Chiwan who had been
taken prisoner many years. before; the second Cree had two wives, the
third one; and all three men had many children. They pitched their
camp at a distance from the Sekani, and never moved away from it after
dark. Consequently the hunter, instead of fleeing and abandoning his
aged mother, left his camp before daylight every morning, travelled far
out into the woods in different directions, marking the snow to indicate
to approaching Sekani that there were Cree in the neighbourhood, and
returned long after sunset. His mother, whom the Cree did not molest by
day, sat up and kept watch while he slept. At last eight Sekani families
came and joimed him. Usdjenta, the eldest Cree, decided to attack them,
although his two companions shrank from the unequal contest; but Chiwan,
his Sekani wife, secretly warned her people, who attacked first, killing men,
women and children, even a young girl who fled on to the ice and begged
for mercy. Chiwan alone they spared, although they killed her children,
lest when they grew up they would try to avenge their father’s death.