For three miles we followed the mocking call of the spirit of the brown stream. Her breath was as sweet as the breath of wild roses covered with dew. Never in the woods have I been so impressed, so startled, with the feeling that a living thing was calling me.
We could find no words to express our delight as we climbed the path beside the brown stream, whose waters came laughingly down through a deep, dim gorge. They fell sheer in sparkling cataracts; they widened into thin, singing shallows of palest amber, clinking against the stones; narrow and foaming, they wound in and out among the trees; they disappeared completely under wide sprays of ferns and the flat, spreading branches of trees, only to "make a sudden sally" farther down.
At first we were level with them, walked beside them, and paused to watch the golden gleams in their clear depths; but gradually we climbed, until we were hundreds of feet above them.
Down in those purple shadows they went romping on to the sea; sometimes only a flash told us where they curved; other times, they pushed out into open spaces, and made pause in deep pools, where they whirled and eddied for a moment before drawing together and hurrying on. But always and everywhere the music of their wild, sweet, childish laughter floated up to us.
In the dim light of early morning the fine mist of the rain sinking through the gorge took on tones of lavender and purple. The tall trees climbing through it seemed even more beautiful than they really were, by the touch of mystery lent by the rain.
I wish that Max Nonnenbruch, who painted the adorable, compelling "Bride of the Wind," might paint the elfish sprite that dwells in the gorge at Ketchikan. He, and he alone, could paint her so that one could hear her impish laughter, and her mocking, fluting call.
The name of the stream I shall never tell. Only an unimaginative modern Vancouver or Cook could have bestowed upon it the name that burdens it to-day. Let it be the "brown stream" at Ketchikan.
If the people of the town be wise, they will gather this gorge to themselves while they may; treasure it, cherish it, and keep it "unspotted from the world"—yet for the world.
Metlakahtla means "the channel open at both ends." It was here that Mr. William Duncan came in 1857, from England, as a lay worker for the Church Mission Society. It had been represented that existing conditions among the natives sorely demanded high-minded missionary work. The savages at Fort Simpson were considered the worst on the coast at that time, and he was urged not to locate there. Undaunted, however, Mr. Duncan, who was then a very young man, filled with the fire and zeal of one who has not known failure, chose this very spot in which to begin his work—among Indians so low in the scale of human intelligence that they had even been accused of cannibalism.