can tell what fatal trick of sound, what current
of air, what faltering note in the voice of the Medicine Man had
deceived his alert Indian ears? But some unhappy fate had led him to
understand that his solitude must be of ten years' duration, not ten
days, and he had accepted the mandate with the heroism of a stoic. For
if he had refused to do so his belief was that although the threatened
disaster would be spared him, the evil would fall upon his tribe. Thus
was one more added to the long list of self-forgetting souls whose
creed has been, 'It is fitting that one should suffer for the people.'
It was the world-old heroism of vicarious sacrifice.

"With his hunting-knife the banished Squamish chief stripped the bark
from the firs and cedars, building for himself a lodge beside the
Capilano River, where leaping trout and salmon could be speared by
arrow-heads fastened to deftly shaped, long handles. All through the
salmon run he smoked and dried the fish with the care of a housewife.
The mountain sheep and goats, and even huge black and cinnamon bears,
fell before his unerring arrows; the fleet-footed deer never returned
to their haunts from their evening drinking at the edge of the
stream--their wild hearts, their agile bodies were stilled when he took
aim. Smoked hams and saddles hung in rows from the cross poles of his
bark lodge, and the magnificent pelts of animals carpeted his floors,
padded his couch and clothed his body. He tanned the soft doe hides,
making leggings, moccasins and shirts, stitching them together with
deer sinew as he had seen his mother do in the long-ago. He gathered
the juicy salmonberries, their acid a sylvan, healthful change from
meat and fish. Month by month and year by year he sat beside his
lonely camp-fire, waiting for his long term of solitude to end. One
comfort alone was his--he was enduring the disaster, fighting the evil,
that his tribe might go unscathed, that his people be saved from
calamity. Slowly, laboriously the tenth year dawned; day by day it
dragged its long weeks across his waiting heart, for Nature had not yet
given the sign that his long probation was over.

"Then one hot summer day the Thunder Bird came crashing through the
mountains about him. Up from the arms of the Pacific rolled the storm
cloud, and the Thunder Bird, with its eyes of flashing light, beat its
huge vibrating wings on crag and canyon.

"Upstream, a tall shaft of granite rears its needle