19. The Spider and the Widow’s Daughter

There was a famine among the people. There used to be famines because they had no nets to catch salmon, and not many people knew how to make salmon traps and weirs. Therefore dried salmon was not plentiful in winter, and many widows were dying of starvation, and also old people and orphans. When a famine set in, the rich people would leave the village and move to some other place, scattering in every direction, without taking pity on the poor. They left them in the empty villages, and diseases swept the poor people away. Starvation and disease destroyed them all.

So it happened to one widow, who was left in the village when all the wealthy people had moved away. She went into the woods behind the empty village, where a small brook ran down. There she made a little hut for herself and her daughter, and every day she looked out of her little hut, and saw many salmon jumping at the mouth of the brook. They wished to catch them, but they did not know how to do it. They waited for the salmon to go up the brook, intending to club them.

Early every morning the widow came out of her hut and went down to the beach to search for something to eat. Early one morning, on going out, she saw many salmon jumping on the water. She thought her daughter would soon die before the salmon would come up the creek. Therefore she sat down on the bank of the brook, weeping.

Her daughter was alone in the hut. She was in bed, and was starving. When the girl opened her eyes, behold! a tall young man was standing at the door of the hut, who said, “I have come to marry you.” He was a strong-looking young man. The girl was much surprised, and said, “Wait until mother comes in, and tell her what you want!” but the tall young man said, “I can not wait for your mother, won’t you take me now?” The girl agreed, and he married her. He said, “I will come again tonight.” Then he left.

Late in the evening her mother came home sorrowful, but she noticed that her daughter looked happy. She did not ask the reason, and pretended not to notice it. At midnight the tall young man entered the hut. The widow did not sleep, and therefore she saw the door open and the tall young man enter. She saw him go in to her daughter, and she wondered what her daughter had done. Still she was afraid to speak.

Early the next morning she arose and lighted the fire. The tall young man asked the girl, “Why are you staying here?” The girl said, ‘We are waiting for the salmon to come up the brook, then we intend to club them.” He replied, “Tell your mother to bring down nettles, as many as she can find.”

The girl told her mother, who went quickly to gather nettles. After she had tied them into bundles, she carried them down. The young man spread out the nettles in the hut. Then he sharpened a piece of hard wood and split the nettles. He dried them in the sun; and when they were dry, he peeled off the outer bark. On the following day he dried them again. He took three dried ribs of mountain goats, used them as knives to peel off the outer bark until the fiber remained. After the young man had peeled aU the nettles, he showed his mother-in-law how to spin and make thread out of them. He spread the fiber on his right thigh with the thumb of his right hand, and he held the nettle fiber in his left hand with three fingers. Then he worked on, pushing the fiber toward his knee, and drawing it again back toward his body. Thus he twisted the fibers into a thread.

Now the widow had learned it, and worked all night spinning, day by day, and night by night, until she had used up all the fiber of the nettles. Then the young man made a mesh-stick, four fingers wide, and as long as the palm of the hand, out of hard wood, and he began to net; and in three days he had used up all the thread, and his net was twenty fathoms long and twenty meshes wide.

Then he told his mother-in-law to make a good cedar-bark line of three cords, twenty-six fathoms longer than the net; and he took dry red cedar and carved floats out of it.[1]

When the young man had finished the net, he went out in the night with his wife and began to fish. His net was full of salmon; and when he came home early in the morning, his canoe was full of silver salmon. The widow cut them all while they slept, and before evening her son-in-law and her daughter awoke. After they had taken their evening meal, they made ready to go out fishing again, and they came home early, with their canoe full of silver salmon. He smoked the salmon, and enlarged his mother-in-law’s hut and made it into a large house for smoking salmon, and the large house was full of dried salmon.

Then he built another large smoking-house, and it also was soon filled. Then they tied the salmon into bundles. He built a third house, and they stored in it the bundles of dried salmon.[2] When the large house was full of bundles of dried salmon, and the salmon were hanging in the other two houses, the man said to his wife, ‘I am

going away now to my own home. I took pity on you and your mother. Therefore I came to show you how to make nets.” The girl said, I will go with you. Let my mother go to her own home.”

On the following day the young woman told her mother what her husband had said to her; and the widow felt very sad, vet she had nothing to say. The young man said, ‘I will take one bundle of dried salmon for you when you go,” and the young woman was very glad to go with her husband.

In autumn, when the leaves were falling, and all the people had assembled in the village, they saw that all their poor relatives had died of starvation. They took the bodies and burned them. The widow returned to the village, and the people thought that her daughter had died because she had been left alone. She did not tell any one that she had plenty of dried salmon. The people, however, tried to find out what had become of her.

When winter came, the widow called the young men to help her, and they took down two large canoes and went to the place where her storehouses were. Then the young men went up, and saw the houses full of bundles of dried salmon. They carried them down; and when the two large canoes were full, they went home, They carried the bundles of salmon up to the widow’s brother’s large house. On the following day the two large canoes went again, and both were filled with bundles of dried salmon, Now, the large house was quite full. When all the bundles of dried salmon had been taken to the village, she invited her tribe to give each chief one bundle of dried salmon, and divided one bundle between each man and woman, and her fame spread among all the tribes. They came to buy good dried salmon, and she became very wealthy. The net, however, she did not show to any one.

The young man took his wife to his home; and when the young woman sat down on one side of the house, a Mouse Woman came to her, and asked her to cast her woolen ear-ornaments into the fire, After the Mouse Woman had taken the burnt ear-ornaments out of the fire, she said, “Don’t you know who married you?” the woman said, “No.’—It is the Spider. He took pity on you, therefore he went to show you how to make a net. Don’t eat their food, lest you die! If you take your own food, you will remain a human being; but if you eat theirs, you will become a spider.’ Thus said the Mouse Woman, and then she went away.

The woman’s husband showed her some more kinds of netting, and the following summer the Spider’s wife went home to her mother’s camp, and she showed her mother what she had learned in the house of the Spider.

His is how the people in olden times learned how to make nets. That is the end.