powerful
tribes; it will be as if the Indians had lost all bravery, all courage,
all confidence.' He hated the voices, he hated the dream; but all his
power, all his big medicine, could not drive them away. He was the
strongest man on all the North Pacific Coast. He was mighty and very
tall, and his muscles were as those of Leloo, the timber wolf, when he
is strongest to kill his prey. He could go for many days without food;
he could fight the largest mountain lion; he could overthrow the
fiercest grizzly bear; he could paddle against the wildest winds and
ride the highest waves. He could meet his enemies and kill whole
tribes single-handed. His strength, his courage, his power, his
bravery, were those of a giant. He knew no fear; nothing in the sea,
or in the forest, nothing in the earth or the sky, could conquer him.
He was fearless, fearless. Only this haunting dream of the coming
white man's camp he could not drive away; it was the one thing in life
he had tried to kill and failed. It drove him from the feasting, drove
him from the pleasant lodges, the fires, the dancing, the story-telling
of his people in their camp by the water's edge, where the salmon
thronged and the deer came down to drink of the mountain streams. He
left the Indian village, chanting his wild songs as he went. Up
through the mighty forests he climbed, through the trailless deep
mosses and matted vines, up to the summit of what the white men call
Grouse Mountain. For many days he camped there. He ate no food, he
drank no water, but sat and sang his medicine songs through the dark
hours and through the day. Before him--far beneath his feet--lay the
narrow strip of land between the two salt waters. Then the Sagalie
Tyee gave him the power to see far into the future. He looked across a
hundred years, just as he looked across what you call the Inlet, and he
saw mighty lodges built close together, hundreds and thousands of them;
lodges of stone and wood, and long straight trails to divide them. He
saw these trails thronging with Palefaces; he heard the sound of the
white man's paddle-dip on the waters, for it is not silent like the
Indian's; he saw the white man's trading posts, saw the fishing nets,
heard his speech. Then the vision faded as gradually as it came. The
narrow strip of land was his own forest once more.

"'I am old,' he called, in his sorrow and his trouble for his people.
'I am old, oh, Sagalie Tyee! Soon I shall d