Tom is a blind old man, whose staff may be heard any day stumping or splashing along the village street of his tribal reservation, or up or down the hillside that slopes to the smoke-drying huts massed by the Somass river. He is an honored member of the Ts’isha’ath, a Nootka tribe that is now permanently located a few miles up from the head of Alberni Canal, the deepest inlet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The Ts’isha’ath fishes and harpoons along the river, the length of the “Canal,” and down among the hundreds of islands that dot Barkley Sound, the first of the large bays north of Cape Beale that are carved out on the stormy coast line of the island.