hood than
hers, and so much more of battle and bloodshed. Then we drifted into
talk of the sockeye run 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 born, or I, or"--pointing across the park to the distant
city of Vancouver, that breathed its wealth and beauty across the
September afternoon--"before that place born, before white man came
here--oh! long before."

Dear old klootchman! I knew by the dusk in her eyes that she was back
in her Land of Legends, and that soon I would be the richer in my hoard
of Indian lore. She sat, still leaning on her paddle; her eyes,
half-closed, rested on the distant outline of the blurred heights
across the Inlet. I shall not further attempt her broken English, for
this is but the shadow of her story, and without her unique personality
the legend is as a flower that lacks both color and fragrance. She
called it "The Lost Salmon Run."

"The wife of the Great Tyee was but a wisp of a girl, but all the world
was young in those days; even the Fraser River was young and small, not
the mighty water it is today; but the pink salmon crowded its throat
just as they do now, and the tillicums caught and salted and smoked the
fish just as they have done this year, just as they will always do.
But it was yet winter, and the rains were slanting and the fogs
drifting, when the wife of the Great Tyee stood before him and said:

"'Before the salmon run I shall give to you a great gift. Will you
honor me most if it is the gift of a boy-child or a girl-child?' The
Great Tyee loved the woman. He was stern with his people, hard with
his tribe; he ruled his council fires with a will of stone. His
medicine men said he had no human heart in his body; his warriors said
he had no human blood in his veins. But he clasped this woman's hands,
and his eyes, his lips, his voice, were gentle as her own, as he
replied:

"'Give to me a girl-child--a little girl-child--that she may grow to be
like you, and, in her turn, give to her husband children.'

"But when the tribes-people heard of his choice they arose in great
anger. They surrounded him in a deep, indignant circle. 'You are a
slave to the woman,' they declared, 'and now you desire to make
yourself a slave to a woman-baby. We want an