LEGENDS OF VANCOUVER
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 Van- couver, that breathed its wealth and beauty across the September aftemoon—“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
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