Читать книгу Blackfeet Tales of Glacier National Park - James Willard Schultz - Страница 8

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Again my people are filled with resentment against the whites. I told them this afternoon that the falls in the river between this and the lower lake had been given a foolish white men’s name. I could not tell them what it was, for there is no Blackfeet equivalent for the word “Trick.” But what a miserable, circus-suggesting name that is to give to one of the most beautiful of waterfalls, and the only one of its kind in America, and in all the world, for all I know! A short distance below the outlet of the upper lake the river sinks, and a half-mile farther on gushes into sight from a jagged hole halfway up the side of a high and almost perpendicular cliff.

“In the long ago we named that Pi′tamakan Falls,” said Tail-Feathers-Coming-over-the-Hill.

“Yes? And who was he?” I asked, although I had a fair recollection of the story of that personage. But I had forgotten the details of it, and wanted them all.

“Not he, but she!” he corrected me.

“But Pi′tamakan (Running Eagle) is a man’s name,” I objected.

“True. But this woman earned the right to bear a man’s name, and so it was given her. She was the only woman of our people to receive that honor, so far as I know. Listen! You shall hear all about it.”