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

that their sire would some day return. Often they voiced this feeling to their mother, but she would only weep and say that not even the witchcraft of the great medicine-man could bring him to them. But when they were ten years old the two children came to their mother, hand within hand. They were armed with their little hunting-knives, their salmon-spears, their tiny bows and arrows.

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

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

“ ‘Oh! useless quest,’ echoed the tribespeople.

“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 upstream, 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 goodbye, 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 tribespeople 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 favourite 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 dreamworld of sea and shore and sky.

I hurried up-shore, hailing her in the Chinook, and as she caught my voice she lifted her paddle directly above her head in the Indian signal of greeting.

As she beached, I greeted her with extended eager hands to assist her ashore, for the klootchman is getting to be an old woman; albeit she paddles against tidewater like a boy in his teens.

“No,” she said, as I begged her to come ashore. “I will wait⁠—me. I just come to fetch Maarda; she been city; she soon come⁠—now.” But she left her “working” attitude and curled like a schoolgirl in the bow of the canoe, her elbows resting on her paddle which she had flung across the gunwales.

“I have missed you, klootchman; you have not been to see me for three moons, and you have not fished or been at the canneries,” I remarked.

“No,” she said. “I stay home this year.” Then, leaning towards me with grave import in her manner, her eyes, her voice, she added, “I have a grandchild, born first week July, so⁠—I stay.”

So this explained her absence. I, of course, offered congratulations and enquired all about the great event, for this was her first grandchild, and the little person was of importance.

“And are you going to make a fisherman of him?” I asked.

“No, no, not boy-child, it is girl-child,” she answered with some indescribable trick of expression that led me to know she preferred it so.

“You are pleased it is a girl?” I questioned in surprise.

“Very pleased,” she replied emphatically. “Very good luck to have girl for first grandchild. Our tribe not like yours; we want girl children first; we not always wish boy-child born just for fight. Your people, they care only for warpath; our tribe more peaceful. Very good sign first grandchild to be girl. I tell you why: girl-child may be some time mother herself; very grand thing to be mother.”

I felt I had caught the secret of her meaning. She was rejoicing that this little one should some time become one of the mothers of her race. We chatted over it a little longer and she gave me several playful “digs” about my own tribe thinking so much less of motherhood than hers, and so much more of battle and bloodshed. Then we drifted into talk of the sockeye and of the hyiu chickimin the Indians would get.

“Yes, hyiu chickimin,” she repeated with a sigh of satisfaction. “Always; and hyiu muck-a-muck when big salmon run. No more ever come that bad year when not any fish.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“Before you