Legends of Vancouver, E. Pauline Johnson [new books to read .txt] 📗

The experience of age was gradually but inevitably giving way to the strength and enthusiasm of youth. Then, one day, they met face to face and alone⁠—the old, war-scarred chief, the young battle-inspired brave. It was an unequal combat, and at the close of a brief but violent struggle the younger had brought the older to his knees. Standing over him with up-poised knife the Tulameen brave laughed sneeringly, and said:

“Would you, my enemy, have this victory as your own? If so, I give it to you; but in return for my submission I demand of you⁠—your daughter.”

For an instant the old chief looked in wonderment at his conqueror; he thought of his daughter only as a child who played about the forest-trails or sat obediently beside her mother in the lodge, stitching her little moccasins or weaving her little baskets.

“My daughter!” he answered sternly. “My daughter⁠—who is barely out of her own cradle-basket⁠—give her to you, whose hands are blood-dyed with the killing of a score of my tribe? You ask for this thing?”

“I do not ask it,” replied the young brave. “I demand it; I have seen the girl and I shall have her.”

The old chief sprang to his feet and spat out his refusal. “Keep your victory, and I keep my girl-child,” though he knew he was not only defying his enemy, but defying death as well.

The Tulameen laughed lightly, easily. “I shall not kill the sire of my wife,” he taunted. “One more battle must we have, but your girl-child will come to me.”

Then he took his victorious way up the trail, while the old chief walked with slow and springless step down into the canyon.

The next morning the chief’s daughter was loitering along the heights, listening to the singing river, and sometimes leaning over the precipice to watch its curling eddies and dancing waterfalls. Suddenly she heard a slight rustle, as though some passing bird’s wing had clipt the air. Then at her feet there fell a slender, delicately shaped arrow. It fell with spent force, and her Indian woodcraft told her it had been shot to her, not at her. She started like a wild animal. Then her quick eye caught the outline of a handsome, erect figure that stood on the heights across the river. She did not know him as her father’s enemy. She only saw him to be young, stalwart, and of extraordinary manly beauty. The spirit of youth and of a certain savage coquetry awoke within her. Quickly she fitted one of her own dainty arrows to the bowstring and sent it winging across the narrow canyon; it fell, spent, at his feet, and he knew she had shot it to him, not at him.

Next morning, womanlike, she crept noiselessly to the brink of the heights. Would she see him again⁠—that handsome brave? Would he speed another arrow to her? She had not yet emerged from the tangle of forest before it fell, its faint-winged flight heralding its coming. Near the feathered end was tied a tassel of beautiful ermine-tails. She took from her wrist a string of shell beads, fastened it to one of her little arrows, and winged it across the canyon, as yesterday.

The following morning, before leaving the lodge, she fastened the tassel of ermine-tails in her straight black hair. Would he see them? But no arrow fell at her feet that day, but a dearer message was there on the brink of the precipice. He himself awaited her coming⁠—he who had never left her thoughts since that first arrow came to her from his bowstring. His eyes burned with warm fires, as she approached, but his lips said simply: “I have crossed the Tulameen River.” Together they stood, side by side, and looked down at the depths before them, watching in silence the little torrent rollicking and roystering over its boulders and crags.

“That is my country,” he said, looking across the river. “This is the country of your father, and of your brothers; they are my enemies. I return to my own shore tonight. Will you come with me?”

She looked up into his handsome young face. So this was her father’s foe⁠—the dreaded Tulameen!

“Will you come?” he repeated.

“I will come,” she whispered.

It was in the dark of the moon and through the kindly night he led her far up the rocky shores to the narrow belt of quiet waters, where they crossed in silence into his own country. A week, a month, a long golden summer, slipped by, but the insulted old chief and his enraged sons failed to find her.

Then, one morning, as the lovers walked together on the heights above the far upper reaches of the river, even the ever-watchful eyes of the Tulameen failed to detect the lurking enemy. Across the narrow canyon crouched and crept the two outwitted brothers of the girl-wife at his side; their arrows were on their bowstrings, their hearts on fire with hatred and vengeance. Like two evil-winged birds of prey those arrows sped across the laughing river, but before they found their mark in the breast of the victorious Tulameen the girl had unconsciously stepped before him. With a little sigh, she slipped into his arms, her brothers’ arrows buried into her soft, brown flesh.

It was many a moon before his avenging hand succeeded in slaying the old chief and those two hated sons of his. But when this was finally done the handsome young Tulameen left his people, his tribe, his country, and went into the far north. “For,” he said, as he sang his farewell war-song, “my heart lies dead in the Tulameen River.”

But the spirit of his girl-wife still sings through the canyon, its song blending with the music of that sweetest-voiced river in all the great valleys of the Dry Belt. That is why this laughter, the sobbing murmur of the beautiful Tulameen, will haunt for evermore the ear that has once listened to its song.

The Grey Archway

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