great-grandsires
saw it; but that was long ago. My father never saw it, though he spent
many days in many years searching, always searching, for it. I am an
old man myself, and I have never seen it, though from my youth I, too,
have searched. Sometimes in the stillness of the nights I have paddled
up in my canoe." Then, lowering his voice: "Twice I have seen its
shadow: high rocky shores, reaching as high as the 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