"
The Klootchman's voice ceased. For a long moment she gazed straight
before her, then looking at me said:
"You have heard the Falls of Lillooet weep?" I nodded.
"It is the weeping of that Indian mother, sobbing through the
centuries, that you hear." She uttered the words with a cadence
of grief in her voice.
"Hours, nights, days, they searched for the morning-child," she
continued. "And each moment of that unending agony to the
mother-woman is repeated to-day in the call, the wail, the
everlasting sobbing of the falls. At night the wolves howled up
the canyon. 'God of my fathers, keep safe my Morning-child' the
mother would implore. In the glare of day eagles poised, and
vultures wheeled above the forest, their hungry claws, their
unblinking eyes, their beaks of greed shining in the sunlight.
'God of my fathers, keep safe my Morning-child' was again wrung
from the mother's lips. For one long moon, that dawned, and
shone and darkened, that mother's heart lived out its torture.
Then one pale daybreak a great fleet of canoes came down the
Frazer River. Those that paddled were of a strange tribe, they
spoke in a strange tongue, but their hearts were human, and their
skins were of the rich copper-color of the Upper Lillooet country.
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