“That youngster built that house all by himself,” volunteered one of the ship’s officers at my elbow.  “He is a born carpenter, and gets all the work he can do.  He has supported his mother in comfort for two years, and he isn’t full grown yet.”

“Who is he?” I asked, with keen interest.

“His name is Tenas,” replied the officer.  “His mother is a splendid woman.  ‘Hoolool,’ they call her.  She is quite the best carver of Totem Poles on the North Coast.”

The Wolf-Brothers

Leloo’s father and mother were both of the great Lillooet tribe of British Columbia Indians, splendid people of a stalwart race of red men, who had named the boy Leloo because, from the time he could toddle about on his little, brown, bare feet, he had always listened with delight to the wolves howling across the canyons and down the steeps of the wonderful mountain country where he was born.  In the Chinook language Leloo means wolf, and before the little fellow could talk he would stand nightly at the lodge door and imitate the long, weird barking and calling of his namesakes, while his father would smile knowingly and say, “He will some day make a great hunter, will our little Leloo,” and his mother would answer proudly, “Yes, he has no fear of wild things.  No wolf in the mountains will be mighty enough to scare him—­our little Leloo.”

So he grew from babyhood into boyhood with a love for the furry-coated wild creatures that prowled along the timber line, and their voices were to him the voices of friends who had sung him to sleep ever since he could remember anything.

But the night of his famous ride up the Cariboo Trail where it skirts the Bonaparte Hills proved to him how wise a thing it was that he had long ago made friends, instead of foes, of the wolves, for if he had feared them, it would have been a ride of terror instead of triumph, as it was his love for them that helped him to do a great, heroic thing which made the very name “Leloo” beloved by every man, both white and Indian, in all the Lillooet country.

It was one day early in the autumn that Leloo’s father sent him down the trail some ten or fifteen miles with a message to the “boss” of the great railway construction camp that the Lillooet Indians would supply fifty men to work on the Company’s roadway.  So the boy mounted his pet cayuse and started off early, swinging down the mountain trails into the canyons, then climbing again across the summit, with its dense growth of timber.  His little legs were almost too short to grip his horse’s middle as his father could have done, so he went more slowly and carefully over the dangerous places, marking every one in his mind, in case he was late in returning.  When he reached the camp the “boss” was absent, and, Indian-like, he would deliver his message to no one else except the man it was intended for, and when the “boss” returned at supper time from far down the grade, he insisted upon Leloo sharing his pork and beans and drinking great quantities of tea.