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LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER

“It will be to-day," she said proudly.

He sprang from his couch of wolf skins and
looked out upon the coming day: the promise
of what it would bring him seemed breathing
through all his forest world. He took her
very gently by the hand and led her through
the tangle of wilderness down to the water’s
edge, where the beauty spot we modems call
Stanley Park bends about Prospect Point. “I
must swim,” he told her.

“I must swim, too,” she smiled with the per-
fect understanding of two beings who are
mated. For to them the old Indian custom
was law—the custom that the parents of a
coming child must swim until their flesh is so
clear and clean that a wild animal cannot
scent their proximity. If the wild creatures of
the forests have no fear of them, then, and only
then, are they fit to become parents, and to
scent a human is in itself a fearsome thing to
all wild creatures.

So those two plunged into the waters
of the Narrows as the grey dawn slipped up
the eastern skies and all the forest awoke to
the life of a new, glad day. Presently he took
her ashore, and smilingly she crept away
under the giant trees. “I must be alone,”
she said, “but come to me at sunrise: you will
not find me alone then.” He smiled also, and
plunged back into the sea. He must swim,

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