wise old leader, who, as king of the colony, advanced some few yards
ahead of his battalions. Out of the waters through the forest towards
the country to the north they journeyed. Wandering hunters said they
saw them cross Burrard Inlet at the Second Narrows, heading inland as
they reached the farther shore. But where that mighty army of royal
little Canadians set up their new colony, no man knows. Not even the
astuteness of the first Capilano ever discovered their destination.
Only one thing was certain. Deer Lake knew them no more.
After their passing, the Indian retraced their trail to the water's
edge. In the red glare of the encircling fires he saw what he at first
thought was some dead and dethroned king beaver on the shore. A huge
carcass lay half in, half out, of the lake. Approaching it he saw the
wasted body of a giant seal. There could never be two seals of that
marvellous size. His intuition now grasped the meaning of the omen of
the beckoning flame that had called him from the far coasts of Point
Grey. He stooped above his dead conqueror and found, embedded in its
decaying flesh, the elk-bone spear of his forefathers, and trailing
away at the water's rim was a long flexible cedar-fibre rope.
As he extracted this treasured heirloom he felt the "power," that men
of magic possess, creep up his sinewy arms. It entered his heart, his
blood, his brain. For a long time he sat and chanted songs that only
great medicine men may sing, and, as the hours drifted by, the heat of
the forest fires subsided, the flames diminished into smouldering
blackness. At daybreak the forest fire was dead, but its beckoning
fingers had served their purpose. The magic elk-bone spear had come
back to its own.
Until the day of his death the first Capilano searched for the unknown
river up which the seal travelled from False Creek to Deer Lake, but
its channel is a secret that even Indian eyes have not seen.
But although those of the Squamish tribe tell and believe that the
river still sings through its hidden trail that leads from Deer Lake to
the sea, its course is as unknown, its channel is as hopelessly lost as
the brave little army of beavers that a century ago marshalled their
forces and travelled up into the great lone north.
A Royal Mohawk Chief
How many Canadians are aware that in Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught,
and only surviving son of Queen Victoria, who has been appointed to
represent King George V. in Canada, they undoubtedly have what many
wish for--one bearing an ancient Canadian title as Governor-General of
all the Dominion? It would be difficult to find a man more Canadian
than any one of the fifty chiefs who compose the parliament of the
ancient Iroquois nation, that loyal race of Redskins that has fought
for the British crown against all of the enemies thereof, adhering to
the British flag through the wars against both the French and the
colonists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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