She was working on a headdress consisting of a single red fox-tail and eagle feathers, when he came and stood beside her.

“Mama,” he said, “there is a prairie wolf skin you cover the babies with while they sleep.  Would you let me have it this once, if they would not be cold without it?”

“They will never be cold,” she smiled, “for I can use an extra blanket over them.  I only use it because I started to when you were the only baby I had, and it was your name, so I covered you with it at night.”

“And I want to cover myself with it now,” he explained, “its head as my headdress, its front paws about my neck, its thick fur and tail trailing behind me as I dance.”

“So you are going to dance, my little Ta-la-pus?” she answered proudly.  “But how is that, when you do not yet know our great tribal dances?”

“I have made one of my own, and a song, too,” he said, shyly.

She caught him to her, smoothing the hair back from his dark forehead.  “That is right,” she half whispered, for she felt he did not want anyone but herself to know his boyish secret.  “Always make things for yourself, don’t depend on others, try what you can do alone.  Yes, you may take the skin of the prairie wolf.  I will give it to you for all time—­it is yours.”

That night his father also laid in his hands a gift.  It was a soft, pliable belt, woven of the white, peeled roots of the cedar, dyed brilliantly, and worked into a magnificent design.

“Your great-grandmother made it,” said the chief.  “Wear it on your first journey into the larger world than this island, and do nothing in all your life that would make her regret, were she alive, to see it round your waist.”

So little Ta-la-pus set forth with his father and brother, well equipped for the great Potlatch, and the meeting of many from half a score of tribes.

They crossed the Straits on a white man’s steamer, a wonderful sight to Ta-la-pus, who had never been aboard any larger boat than his father’s fishing smack and their own high-bowed, gracefully-curved canoe.  In and out among the islands of the great gulf the steamer wound, bringing them nearer, ever nearer to the mainland.  Misty and shadowy, Vancouver Island dropped astern, until at last they steamed into harbor, where a crowd of happy-faced Squamish Indians greeted them, stowed them away in canoes, paddled a bit up coast, then sighted the great, glancing fires that were lighting up the grey of oncoming night—­fires of celebration and welcome to all the scores of guests who were to partake of the lavish hospitality of the great Squamish chief.