ding for the beach
that is the favorite 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 dream-world of sea and shore and sky.

I hurried upshore, 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 not wait--me. I
just come to fetch Maarda; she been city; she come soon--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 war-path; our tribe more peaceful. Very good sign
first grandchild to be girl. I tell you why: girl-child maybe 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 mother