elk-bone spear, of his cedar-fibre rope, could be found.  With the loss of the latter he firmly believed his luck as a hunter would be gone.  So he patrolled the mouth of False Creek for many moons.  His graceful, high-bowed canoe rarely touched other waters, but the seal king had disappeared.  Often he thought long strands of drifting sea grasses were his lost cedar-fibre rope.  With other spears, with other cedar-fibres, with paddle-blade and cunning traps he dislodged the weeds from their moorings, but they slipped their slimy lengths through his eager hands:  his best spear with its attendant coil was gone.

The following year he was sealing again off the coast of Point Grey, and one night, after sunset, he observed the red reflection from the west, which seemed to transfer itself to the eastern skies.  Far into the night dashes of flaming scarlet pulsed far beyond the head of False Creek.  The color rose and fell like a beckoning hand, and, Indian-like, he immediately attached some portentous meaning to the unusual sight.  That it was some omen he never doubted, so he paddled inland, beached his canoe, and took the trail towards the little group of lakes that crowd themselves into the area that lies between the present cities of Vancouver and New Westminster.  But long before he reached the shores of Deer Lake he discovered that the beckoning hand was in reality flame.  The little body of water was surrounded by forest fires.  One avenue alone stood open.  It was a group of giant trees that as yet the flames had not reached.  As he neared the point he saw a great moving mass of living things leaving the lake and hurrying northward through this one egress.  He stood, listening, intently watching with alert eyes; the zwirr of myriads of little travelling feet caught his quick ear—­the moving mass was an immense colony of beaver.  Thousands upon thousands of them.  Scores of baby beavers staggered along, following their mothers; scores of older beavers that had felled trees and built dams through many seasons; a countless army of trekking fur-bearers, all under the generalship of a wise old leader, who, as king of the colony, advanced some few yards ahead of his battalions.  Out of the waters through the forest towards the country to the north they journeyed.  Wandering hunters said they saw them cross Burrard Inlet at the Second Narrows, heading inland as they reached the farther shore.  But where that mighty army of royal little Canadians set up their new colony no man knows.  Not even the astuteness of the first Capilano ever discovered their destination.  Only one thing was certain:  Deer Lake knew them no more.

After their passing the Indian retraced their trail to the water’s edge.  In the red glare of the encircling fires he saw what he at first thought was some dead and dethroned king beaver on the shore.  A huge carcass lay half in, half out, of the lake.  Approaching it, he saw the wasted body of a giant seal.  There could never be two seals of that marvellous size.  His intuition now grasped the meaning of the omen of the beckoning flame that had called him from the far coasts of Point Grey.  He stooped above his dead conqueror and found, embedded in its decaying flesh, the elk-bone spear of his forefathers, and, trailing away at the water’s rim, was a long, flexible, cedar-fibre rope.