“‘We go to find our father,’ they said.

“‘Oh! useless quest,’ wailed the mother.

“‘Oh! useless quest,’ echoed the tribes-people.

“But the great medicine-man said, ’The heart of a child has invisible eyes; perhaps the child-eyes see him.  The heart of a child has invisible ears; perhaps the child-ears hear him call.  Let them go.’  So the little children went forth into the forest; their young feet flew as though shod with wings, their young hearts pointed to the north as does the white man’s compass.  Day after day they journeyed up-stream, until, rounding a sudden bend, they beheld a bark lodge with a thin blue curl of smoke drifting from its roof.

“‘It is our father’s lodge,’ they told each other, for their childish hearts were unerring in response to the call of kinship.  Hand in hand they approached, and entering the lodge, said the one word, ‘Come.’

“The great Squamish chief outstretched his arms towards them, then towards the laughing river, then towards the mountains.

“‘Welcome, my sons!’ he said.  ’And good-bye, my mountains, my brothers, my crags, and my canyons!’ And with a child clinging to each hand he faced once more the country of the tidewater.”

* * * * *

The legend was ended.

For a long time he sat in silence.  He had removed his gaze from the bend in the river, around which the two children had come and where the eyes of the recluse had first rested on them after ten years of solitude.

The chief spoke again:  “It was here, on this spot we are sitting, that he built his lodge:  here he dwelt those ten years alone, alone.”

I nodded silently.  The legend was too beautiful to mar with comments, and, as the twilight fell, we threaded our way through the underbrush, past the disused logger’s camp, and into the trail that leads citywards.

THE LOST SALMON-RUN

Great had been the “run,” and the sockeye season was almost over.  For that reason I wondered many times why my old friend, the klootchman, had failed to make one of the fishing fleet.  She was an indefatigable work-woman, rivalling her husband as an expert catcher, and all the year through she talked of little else but the coming run.  But this especial season she had not appeared amongst her fellow-kind.  The fleet and the canneries knew nothing of her, and when I enquired of her tribes-people they would reply without explanation, “She not here this year.”

But one russet September afternoon I found her.  I had idled down the trail from the swans’ basin in Stanley Park to the rim that skirts the Narrows, and I saw her graceful, high-bowed canoe heading for the beach that is the favorite landing-place of the “tillicums” from the Mission.  Her canoe looked like a dream-craft, for the water was very still, and everywhere a blue film hung like a fragrant veil, for the peat on Lulu Island had been smoldering for days and its pungent odors and blue-grey haze made a dream-world of sea and shore and sky.