, and
only then, are they fit to become parents, and to scent a human is in
itself a fearsome thing to all wild creatures.

So those two plunged into the waters of the Narrows as the grey dawn
slipped up the eastern skies and all the forest awoke to the life of a
new, glad day. Presently he took her ashore, and smilingly she crept
away under the giant trees. "I must be alone," she said, "but come to
me at sunrise: you will not find me alone then." He smiled also, and
plunged back into the sea. He must swim, swim, swim through this hour
when his fatherhood was coming upon him. It was the law that he must
be clean, spotlessly clean, so that when his child looked out upon the
world it would have the chance to live its own life clean. If he did
not swim hour upon hour his child would come to an unclean father. He
must give his child a chance in life; he must not hamper it by his own
uncleanliness at its birth. It was the tribal law--the law of
vicarious purity.

As he swam joyously to and fro, a canoe bearing four men headed up the
Narrows. These men were giants in stature, and the stroke of their
paddles made huge eddies that boiled like the seething tides.

"Out from our course!" they cried as his lithe, copper-colored body
arose and fell with his splendid stroke. He laughed at them, giants
though they were, and answered that he could not cease his swimming at
their demand.

"But you shall cease!" they commanded. "We are the men (agents) of the
Sagalie Tyee (God), and we command you ashore out of our way!" (I find
in all these Coast Indian legends that the Deity is represented by four
men, usually paddling an immense canoe.)

He ceased swimming, and, lifting his head, defied them. "I shall not
stop, nor yet go ashore," he declared, striking out once more to the
middle of the channel.

"Do you dare disobey us," they cried--"we, the men of the Sagalie Tyee?
We can turn you into a fish, or a tree, or a stone for this; do you
dare disobey the Great Tyee?"

"I dare anything for the cleanliness and purity of my coming child. I
dare even the Sagalie Tyee Himself, but my child must be born to a
spotless life."

The four men were astounded. They consulted together, lighted their
pipes and sat in council. Never had they, the men of the Sagalie Tyee,
been defied before. Now, for the sake of a little unborn child, they
were ignored, disobeyed, almost despised. The lithe young
copper-colored body still dis