Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/514

510 berries, greatly amused his guide, who explained that the Kootenays did not like these berries half as well as did the Shuswap Indians, for they 'tasted like bad whiskey.' It may be said here that the Kootenays have many names, but little use for whiskey, both on account of their own inclination against it, and by reason of the stringent laws and the good influence of the Catholic missionaries—the miners also, as a mere matter of self-defense, aid in the thorough enforcement of the law. The story is told of a Kootenay who, when sick, was told by a priest to take a little whiskey as medicine. He sturdily refused, with the emphatic declaration: 'You say whiskey bad. Bad one time, bad all time.' Poetic justice was satisfied by the recovery of the patient. The Indians are very skilful in their mimicry of the drunken white man. Among the Kootenay names for whiskey are the following: wūō (water, liquor), sūyā́pi wūō (white man's water), nip'ik' · ā wūō (spirit water), nōtlūkinē wūō (strange, foreign water).

After the tasting of the berries was over, Amelu took pleasure in crushing some of them between the palms of his hands and showing how 'soap' could be made. The leaves of the shrub he then used as a very primitive towel. Other experiences of the writer on this excursion convinced him that the Kootenays are not without a sense of humor. On the Mooyai trail the writer ran into a group of nettles, and Amelu hugely enjoyed his surprise at being stung.

This humorous reaction to the surprise, embarrassment, awkward predicament, accidental discomfiture, etc., of a fellow man is common among these Indians, both with reference to their own tribesmen and to individuals of other races, such as whites and Chinese, with whom they come into contact. In the region of the Columbia lakes, there are a cold spring and a warm spring (not steaming so as to be noticed) close beside each other, and a common trick of the Indians is to induce an unsuspecting stranger (red or white) to step into one immediately after the other. The writer, upon the suggestion of Amelu, once took a plunge in the Kootenay at Ft. Steele, but did not stay in more than a moment. The water was almost icy cold, as the Indian knew, by his own confession, and the haste with which his white friend got out of the water stirred deeply his sense of the ridiculous. Similarly, whenever the Indian horse threw him off into the pine-brush or cast him over its head into a creek, his guide would feel bound to laugh more or less heartily. Another fertile source of amusement was the embarrassment caused the writer by his first acquaintance with the snapping and snarling, no less than thieving, Indian dogs, who were the pest of the camp. One of these curs actually seized hold of a can of corned beef and was running off with it, when the use of another can as a missile caused him to give up his plunder. This action must have seemed very funny to Amelu.