Page:Recollections of My Boyhood.djvu/72

Rh came, when a sound of mighty wings was heard and an awful voice came from overhead saying, "Chuchonnyhoof-ouf! ouf! ouf!" Again came that awful voice crying, "Who! Who! Who are you?" The three younger children, trembling with fear, clung to mother's skirts, but she laughed and told us it was only an owl. That is what I believed, too, until I had become learned in the religion of the Kommema and was told all about the great Kalapooya goblin, Chuchounyhoof.

Our second camp scene in the grove of oaks was brilliant while it lasted. Uncle Jesse Applegate's hut was covered with fir houghs which had become very dry. In the evenings it was his custom to read and write by the light of pitch splinters, a substitute for candles. While so engaged, quite late one evening, the volume of flame suddenly increased, the tongue of fire shot up and instantly the roof of boughs caught fire, with an explosion like gunpowder. All the upper part of the shanty burned away before the fire could be checked. I doubt if Uncle Jesse considered this sudden combustion of the roof of his "study" as a capital joke, but I heard laughter in the grove after the illumination.

The native population in our neighborhood was a tribe of the Kalapooya and near and far, even to the sea, were the Tillamook, Tawalatin, Chemeketa, and Luckyuke tilikum, all seeming to be one tribe and speaking the same language. They were a degenerate and priest-ridden people, but their language was remarkably smooth and musical. It was a custom of these Indians, late in the autumn, after the wild wheat, Lamoro sappolil, was fairly ripe, to burn off the whole country. The grass would burn away and leave the sappolil standing, with the pods well dried and bursting. Then the squaws, both young and old, would go with their baskets and bats and gather in the grain. The lamoro sappolil we now know as tar-weed.

It is probable we did not yet know that the Indians were wont to baptise the whole country with fire at the close of every summer; but very soon we were to learn our first lesson.