FullReads

“With his hunting-knife the banished Squamish chief stripped the bark from the firs and cedars, building for himself a lodge beside the Capilano River, where leaping trout and salmon could be speared by arrow-heads fastened to deftly shaped, long handles. All through the salmon run he smoked and dried the fish with the care of a housewife. The mountain sheep and goats, and even huge black and cinnamon bears, fell before his unerring arrows; the fleet-footed deer never returned to their haunts from their evening drinking at the edge of the stream–their wild hearts, their agile bodies were stilled when he took aim. Smoked hams and saddles hung in rows from the cross poles of his bark lodge, and the magnificent pelts of animals carpeted his floors, padded his couch and clothed his body. He tanned the soft doe hides, making leggings, moccasins and shirts, stitching them together with deer sinew as he had seen his mother do in the long-ago. He gathered the juicy salmonberries, their acid a sylvan, healthful change from meat and fish. Month by month and year by year he sat beside his lonely camp-fire, waiting for his long term of solitude to end. One comfort alone was his–he was enduring the disaster, fighting the evil, that his tribe might go unscathed, that his people be saved from calamity. Slowly, laboriously the tenth year dawned; day by day it dragged its long weeks across his waiting heart, for Nature had not yet given the sign that his long probation was over.

“Then one hot summer day the Thunder Bird came crashing through the mountains about him. Up from the arms of the Pacific rolled the storm cloud, and the Thunder Bird, with its eyes of flashing light, beat its huge vibrating wings on crag and canyon.

“Upstream, a tall shaft of granite rears its needle-like length. It is named ‘Thunder Rock,’ and wise men of the Paleface people say it is rich in ore–copper, silver and gold. At the base of this shaft the Squamish chief crouched when the storm cloud broke and bellowed through the ranges, and on its summit the Thunder Bird perched, its gigantic wings threshing the air into booming sounds, into splitting terrors, like the crash of a giant cedar hurtling down the mountain side.

“But when the beating of those black pinions ceased and the echo of their thunder waves died down the depths of the canyon, the Squamish chief arose as a new man. The shadow on his soul had lifted, the fears of evil were cowed and conquered. In his brain, his blood, his veins, his sinews, he felt that the poison of melancholy dwelt no more. He had redeemed his fault of fathering twin children; he had fulfilled the demands of the law of his tribe.

“As he heard the last beat of the Thunder Bird’s wings dying slowly, slowly, faintly, faintly, among the crags, he knew that the bird, too, was dying, for its soul was leaving its monster black body, and presently that soul appeared in the sky. He could see it arching overhead, before it took its long journey to the Happy Hunting Grounds, for the soul of the Thunder Bird was a radiant half-circle of glorious color spanning from peak to peak. He lifted his head then, for he knew it was the sign the ancient Medicine Man had told him to wait for–the sign that his long banishment was ended.

“And all these years, down in the tidewater country, the little brown-faced twins were asking childwise, ‘Where is our father? Why have we no father, like other boys?’ To be met only with the oft-repeated reply, ‘Your father is no more. Your father, the great chief, is dead.’

“But some strange filial intuition told the boys that their sire would some day return. Often they voiced this feeling to their mother, but she would only weep and say that not even the witchcraft of the great Medicine Man could bring him to them. But when they were ten years old the two children came to their mother, hand within hand. They were armed with their little hunting-knives, their salmon spears, their tiny bows and arrows.