Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/206

196  any blood relationship), Māhli Moninkwess (the woodchuck), what he could do. She told him to follow a certain road up a mountain. There he found an old man sitting on a rock flapping his wings (arms) violently. This was Wūchowsen, the great wind-blower. He begged Glūs-kābé to take him up higher where he would have space to flap his wings still harder. So Glūs-kābé lifted him up and carried him a long way. When they were over a great lake he let Wūchowsen drop into the water. In falling he broke his wings and lay there helpless.

Glūs-kābé went back to sea and found the ocean as smooth as glass. He enjoyed himself greatly for many days, paddling about, but finally the water grew stagnant and thick, and a great smell arose. The fish died and Glūs-kābé could bear it no longer.

Again he consulted his grandmother and she told him that he must set Wūchowsen free. So he once more bore Wūchowsen back to his mountain, first making him promise not to flap his wings so constantly, but only now and then, so that the Indians might go out in their canoes. Upon his consent to do this, Glūs-kābé mended his broken wings, but they were never quite so strong as at first, and thus we do not now have such terrible winds as in the olden days.

This story was told to me by an old man whom I had always thought dull and almost in his dotage; but one day, after I had told him some Indian legends, his whole face changed, he threw back his head, closed his eyes, and without the slightest warning or preliminary began to relate, almost to chant, this myth in a most extraordinary way, which so startled me that I could not at the time take any notes of it, and was obliged to have it repeated later. The account of Wūchowsen was added to show the wisdom of Glūs-kābé's advice in the earlier part of the tale, and is found among many tribes.



E are confronted with the limited power of the state and the infinite variety of individual enterprise. To the older economists the difference seemed so great that they considered the presumption against state interference to be established. The rule, it is true, was never absolute and unqualified. Adam Smith