e tree-tops on the mainland, then tall
pines and firs on its summit like a king's crown. As I paddled up
the Arm one summer night, long ago, the shadow of these rocks and
firs fell across my canoe, across my face, and across the waters
beyond. I turned rapidly to look. There was no island there,
nothing but a wide stretch of waters on both sides of me, and the
moon almost directly overhead. Don't say it was the shore that
shadowed me," he hastened, catching my thought. "The moon was above
me; my canoe scarce made a shadow on the still waters. No, it was
not the shore."

"Why do you search for it?" I lamented, thinking of the old dreams
in my own life whose realization I have never attained.

"There is something on that island that I want. I shall look for
it until I die, for it is there," he affirmed.

There was a long silence between us after that. I had learned to
love silences when with my old tillicum, for they always led to a
legend. After a time he began voluntarily:

"It was more than one hundred years ago. This great city of
Vancouver was but the dream of the Sagalie Tyee [God] at that time.
The dream had not yet come to the white man; only one great Indian
medicine-man knew that some day a great camp for Palefaces would lie
between False Creek and the Inlet. This dream haunted him; it came
to him night and day--when he was amid his people laughing and
feasting, or when he was alone in the forest chanting his strange
songs, beating his hollow drum, or shaking his wooden witch-rattle
to gain more power to cure the sick and the dying of his tribe. For
years this dream followed him. He grew to be an old, old man, yet
always he could hear voices, strong and loud, as when they first
spoke to him in his youth, and they would say: 'Between the two
narrow strips of salt water the white men will camp, many hundreds
of them, many thousands of them. The Indians will learn their ways,
will live as they do, will become as they are. There will be no
more great war-dances, no more fights with other 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 da