rey haze made a dream-world of sea and
shore and sky.

I hurried up-shore, 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 will wait--me.
I just come to fetch Maarda; she been city; she soon come--now."
But she left her "working" attitude and curled like a school-girl 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 may be 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
motherhood than hers, and so much more of battle and bloodshed.
Then we drifted into talk of the sockeye 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 y