| OLD
Beaver-Tail hated many things, but most of all he hated
the North-West Mounted Police. Not that they had ever
molested or worried him in his far corner of the Crooked
Lakes Indian Reserve, but they stood for the enforcing
of the white man’s laws, and old Beaver-Tail hated
the white man. He would sit for hours together in his
big tepee counting his piles of furs, smoking, grumbling
and storming at the inroads of the palefaces on to his
lands and hunting grounds. Consequently it was an amazing
surprise to everybody when he consented to let his eldest
son, Little Wolf-Willow, go away to attend the Indian
School in far-off Manitoba. But old Beaver-Tail explained
with rare appreciation his reasons for this consent.
He said he wished the boy to learn English, so that
he would grow up to be a keen, sharp trader, like the
men of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the white men
who were so apt to outwit the redskins in a fur-trading
bargain. Thus we see that poor old Beaver-Tail had suffered
and been cheated at the hands of the cunning paleface.
Little Wolf-Willow was not little, by any means; he
was tall, thin, wiry, and quick, a boy of marked intelligence
and much ability. He was called Little Wolf-Willow to
distinguish him from his grandsire, Big Wolf-Willow
by name, whose career as a warrior made him famed throughout
half of the great Canadian North-West. Little Wolf-Willow’s
one idea of life was to grow up and be like his grandfather,
the hero of fifty battles against both hostile Indian
tribes and invading white settlers; to have nine scalps
at his belt, and scars on his face; to wear a crimson-tipped
eagle feather in his hair, and to give a war-whoop that
would echo [Page 247] from lake to
lake and plant fear in the hearts of his enemies. But
instead of all this splendid life the boy was sent away
to the school taught by paleface men and women; to a
terrible, far-away, strange school, where he would have
to learn a new language and perhaps wear clothes like
the white men wore. The superintendent of the school,
who had persuaded old Beaver-Tail to let the boy come,
brought him out from the Crooked lakes with several
other boys. Most of them could speak a few words of
English, but not so Little Wolf-Willow, who arrived
from his prairie tepee dressed in buckskin and moccasins,
a pretty string of white elks’ teeth about his
throat, and his long, straight, black hair braided in
two plaits, interwoven with bits of rabbit skin. A dull
green blanket served as an overcoat, and he wore no
hat at all. His face was small, and beautifully tinted
a rich, reddish copper color, and his eyes were black,
alert, and very shining.
The
teachers greeted him very kindly, and he shook hands
with them gravely, like a very old man. And from that
day onward Little Wolf-Willow shut his heart within
himself, and suffered.
In
the first place, the white people all looked sick to
him—unhealthy, bleached. Then, try as he would,
he could not accustom his feet to the stiff leather
shoes he was induced to wear. One morning his buckskin
coat was missing, and in its place was a nice blue cloth
one with gleaming golden buttons. He hated it, but he
had to wear it. Then his green blanket disappeared;
a warm, heavy overcoat in its place. Then his fringed
buckskin “chaps” went; in their place a
pair of dreadful grey cloth trousers. Little Wolf-Willow
made no comment, but he kept his eyes and ears open,
and mastered a few important words of English, which,
however, he kept to himself—as yet. And then,
one day, when he had worn these hated clothes for a
whole month, the superintendent who had brought him
away from his [Page 248] father’s
tepee sent for him to come to his little office. The
boy went. The superintendent was so kind and so gentle,
and his smile was so true, that the boy had grown somewhat
attached to him, so, without fear of anything in the
world, the little Cree scholar slipped noiselessly into
the room.
“Ah, Little Wolf-Willow,”
said the superintendent, kindly, “I notice that
you are beginning to understand a little English already.”
The boy smiled, and nodded slightly. “You are
very quick and smart, my boy—quick as a lynx,
smart as a fox. Now tell me, are you happy here? Do
you like the school?” continued Mr. Enderby.
There was a brief silence, then
a direct, straight look from the small Cree eyes, and
the words, “I like you—me.”
Mr. Enderby smiled. “That’s
good; I like you, too, Little Wolf-Willow. Now tell
me, do you like your new clothes?”
“No good,” said
the boy.
Mr. Enderby looked grave. “But,
my boy, that is what you must wear if you are to be
educated. Do you know what the word ‘education’
means? Have you ever heard the teachers or boys here
use it?”
“White man, English,”
came the quick reply.
“That’s it; you
have described it exactly. To become educated you must
try and wear and do what the white people do—like
the English, as you say,” Mr. Enderby went on.
“Now what about your hair? White men don’t
wear long hair, and you see all the Cree boys in the
school have let me cut their hair. Wouldn’t you
like to be like them?”
“No; hair good,”
said the boy.
“Well, how about a ‘white’
name?” asked Mr. Enderby. “The other boys
have taken them. Wouldn’t you like me to call
you John? I’d like to?” [Page 249]
“Me Wolf-Willow, same
grandfather,” came in tones of pronounced decision.
“Very well, Little Wolf-Willow,
you must do as you like, you know; but you said when
you came in that you liked me, and I like you very much.
Perhaps some day you will do these things to please
me.” Then Mr. Enderby added softly to himself,
“It will all come in time. It is pretty hard to
ask any boy to give up his language, his clothes, his
customs, his old-time way of living, his name, even
the church of his fathers. I must have patience, patience.”
“You speak?” asked
the boy.
“Just to myself,”
said Mr. Enderby.
“I speak,” said
the little Indian, standing up and looking fearlessly
into the superintendent’s face. “I speak.
I keep hair, good. I keep name Wolf-Willow, good. I
keep skin Indian color. I not white man’s skin.
English skin no good. My skin best, good.”
Mr. Enderby laughed. “No,
no, Little Wolf-Willow, we won’t try to change
the color of your skin,” he said.
“No good try. I keep skin,
better skin than white man. I keep skin, me.”
And the next instant he was gone.
Miss Watson, the matron, appeared
at the door. “What have you done to Little Wolf-Willow?”
she asked in surprise. “Why, he is careering down
the hall at break-neck speed.”
“I believe the child thought
I was going to skin him, to make a white boy out of
him,” laughed Mr. Enderby.
“Poor little chap! I expect
you wanted to cut off his hair,” said Miss Watson,
“and perhaps call him Tom, Dick, Harry, or some
such name.”
“I did,” answered
the superintendent. “The other boys have all come
to it.”
“Yes, I know they have,”
agreed Miss Watson, “but there is something about
that boy that makes me think that you’ll never
get his hair or his name away from him.” [Page
250]
And she was right. They never
did.
It was six years before Little
Wolf-Willow again entered the door of his father’s
tepee. He returned to the Crooked Lakes speaking English
fluently, and with the excellent appointment of interpreter
for the Government Indian Agent. The instant his father
saw him, the alert Cree eye noted the uncut hair. Nothing
could have so pleased Beaver-Tail. He had held for years
a fear in his heart that the school would utterly rob
him of his boy. Little Wolf-Willow’s mother arose
from preparing an antelope stew for supper. She looked
up into her son’s face. When he left he had not
been as high as her ear tips. With the wonderful intuition
of mothers the world over, she knew at the first glance
that they had not made him into a white man. Years seemed
to roll from her face. She had been so fearful lest
he should not come back to their old prairie life.
“Rest here,” she
said, in the gentle Cree tongue. “Rest here, Little
Wolf-Willow; it is your home.”
The boy himself had been almost
afraid to come. He had grown accustomed to sleeping
in a house, in a bed, to wearing shoes, to eating the
white man’s food; but the blood of the prairies
leaped in his veins at the sight of the great tepee,
with its dry sod floor spread with wolf-skins and ancient
buffalo hides. He flung himself on to the furs and the
grass, his fingers threading themselves through the
buckskin fringes that adorned old Beaver-Tail’s
leggings.
“Father,” he cried
out, in the quaint Cree tongue, “father, sire
of my own, I have learned the best the white man had
to give, but they have not changed me, or my heart,
any more than they could change the copper tint of my
skin.”
Old Beaver-Tail fairly chuckled,
then replied, between pipe puffs, “Some of our
Cree boys go to school. They learn the white man’s
ways, and they are of no more [Page 251]
use to their people. They cannot trap for furs, nor
scout, nor hunt, nor find a prairie trail. You are wiser
than that, Little Wolf-Willow. You are smarter than
when you left us, but you return to us, the old people
of your tribe, just the same—just the same as
your father and grandfather.”
“Not quite the same,”
replied the boy, cautiously, “for, father, I do
not now hate the North-West Mounted Police.”
For answer, old Beaver-Tail
snarled like a husky dog. “You’ll hate them
again when you live here long enough!” he muttered.
“And if you have any friends among them, keep
those friends distant, beyond the rim of the horizon.
I will not have their scarlet coats showing here.”
Wisely, the boy did not reply,
and that night, rolled in the coyote skins, he slept
like a little child once more on the floor of his father’s
tepee.
For many months after that he
travelled about the great prairies, visiting with the
Government Indian Agent many distant camps and Cree
lodges. He always rode astride a sturdy little buckskin-colored
cayuse. Like most Indian boys, he was a splendid horseman,
steady in his seat, swift of eye, and sure of every
prairie trail in all Saskatchewan. He always wore a
strange mixture of civilized and savage clothes—fringed
buckskin “chaps,” beaded moccasins, a blue
flannel shirt, a scarlet silk handkerchief knotted around
his throat, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat with a rattlesnake
skin as a hatband, and two magnificent bracelets of
ivory elks’ teeth. His braided hair , his young,
clean, thin, dark face, his fearless riding, began to
be known far and wide. The men of the Hudson’s
Bay Company trusted him. The North-West Mounted Police
loved him. The white traders admired him. But, most
of all, he stood fast in the affection of his own Indian
people. They never forgot the fact that, had he wished,
he could have stayed with the white people altogether,
that he was equal to them in English education, [Page
252] but he did not choose to do so—he
was one of their own for all time.
But one dreadful night Corporal
Manan of the North-West Mounted Police rode into barracks
at Regina, with a serious, worried face. He reported
immediately to his captain. “A bad business, captain,”
he said, coming to attention, “a very bad business,
sir. I have reports from old ‘Scotty’ McIntyre’s
ranch up north that young Wolf-Willow, that we all know
so well, has been caught rustling cattle—cut out
two calves, sir, and—well, he’s stolen them,
sir, and old Scotty is after him with a shot-gun.”
“Too bad, too bad!”
said the captain, with genuine concern. “Young
Wolf-Willow gone wrong! I can hardly believe it. How
old is he, Corporal?”
“About sixteen or seventeen,
I should say, sir.”
“Too bad!” again
said the captain. “Well educated; fine boy, too.
What good has it done him? It seems these Indians will
cut up. Education seems to only make them worse, Corporal.
He’ll feel arrest less from you than most of us.
You’ll have to go. Start early, at daylight, and
bring him in to prison when you return.”
“I?” fairly
shouted Corporal Manan. “I arrest young
Wolf-Willow? No, sir! You’ll have to get another
policeman.”
“You’ll do as you
receive orders,” blurted the captain, then added
more graciously, “Why, Manan, don’t you
see how much better it is to arrest him? Scotty is after
him with a shotgun, and he’ll kill the boy on
sight. Wolf-Willow is safest here. You leave at daylight,
and bring him in, if you have to handcuff him to do
it.”
Corporal Manan spent a miserable
night. Never had a task been so odious to him. He loved
the bright, handsome Cree boy, and his heart was sore
that he had gone wrong, after giving such promise of
a fine, useful manhood. But the white settlers’
cattle must be protected, and orders were orders—a
soldier must obey his superior [Page 253]
officer. So, at daybreak, the fastest horse in the service
was saddled, and Corporal Manan was hard on the trail
of the young Cree thief.
But Little Wolf-Willow knew
nothing of all this. Far away up the northern plains
a terrible bit of news had come to him. At the Hudson’s
Bay post he had been told that his old grandfather had
been caught stealing cattle, that the North-West Mounted
Police were after him, that they would surely capture
him and put him in Regina jail. The boy was horrified.
His own old grandfather a thief! He knew that old warrior
well enough—knew that he was innocent of intentional
crime; knew that, should the scarlet-coated police give
chase, the old Indian would never understand, but would
probably fire and kill the man who attempted to arrest
him. The boy knew that, with his own perfect knowledge
of English, he could explain everything away if only
he could be at his grandfather’s in time, or else
intercept the police before they should arrest him.
His grandfather would shoot; the boy knew it. Then there
would be bloodshed added to theft. But Big Wolf-Willow’s
lodge was ninety miles distant, and it was the middle
of a long, severe winter. What was to be done? One thing
only—he, Little Wolf-Willow, must ride, ride,
ride! He must not waste an hour, or the prison at Regina
would have his grandfather, and perhaps a gallant soldier
of the king would meet his death doing his duty.
Thrusting a pouch of pemmican
into his shirt front, and fastening his buckskin coat
tightly across his chest, he flung himself on to his
wiry little cayuse, faced about to the north-east, and
struck the trail for the lodges of his own people. Then
began the longest, most terrible ride of his life. Afterwards,
when he became a man, he often felt that he lived through
years and years during that ninety-mile journey. On
all sides of him stretched the blinding white, snow-covered
prairie. Not a tree, not an object to mark the trail.
The wind blew straight and [Page 254]
level directly down from the Arctic zone, icy, cutting,
numbing. It whistled past his ears, pricking and stinging
his face like a whiplash. The cold, yellow sunlight
on the snow blinded him, like a light flashed from a
mirror. Not a human habitation, not a living thing,
lay in his path. Night came, with countless stars and
a joyous crescent of Northern Lights hanging low in
the sky, and the intense, still cold that haunts the
prairie country. He grudged the hours of rest he must
give his horse, pitying the poor beast for its lack
of food and water, but compelled to urge it on and on.
After what seemed a lifetime of hardship, both boy and
beast began to weaken. The irresistible sleepiness that
forebodes freezing began to overcome Little Wolf-Willow.
Utter exhaustion was sapping the strength of the cayuse.
But they blundered on, mile after mile, both with the
pluck of the prairies in their red blood; colder, slower,
wearier, they became. Little Wolf-Willow’s head
was whirling, his brain thickening, his fingers clutching
aimlessly. The bridle reins slipped from his hands.
Hunger, thirst, cold, exhaustion, overpowered both horse
and rider. The animal stumbled once, twice, then fell
like a dead weight.
*
* *
* *
*
At
daybreak, Corporal Manan, hot on the pursuit of the
supposed young cattle thief, rode up the freezing trail,
headed for the north-east. A mile ahead of him saw what
he though was a dead steer which the coyotes had probably
killed and were eating. As he galloped nearer he saw
it was a horse. An exclamation escaped his lips. Then,
slipping from his own mount, stiff and half frozen himself,
he bent pityingly above the dead animal that lay with
the slender body of an Indian hugging up to it for warmth.
“Poor little chap!”
choked the Corporal. “Poor Little Wolf-Willow!
Death’s got him now, I’m afraid, and that’s
worse than the Mounted Police.” [Page
255]
Then the soldier knelt down,
and for two long hours rubbed with snow and his own
fur cap the thin, frozen face and hands of the almost
lifeless boy. He rolled the lithe young body about,
pounding it and beating it, until consciousness returned,
and the boy opened his eyes dully.
“That’s better,”
said the Corporal. “Now, my lad, it’s for
home!” Then he stripped himself of his own great-coat,
wrapped it snugly about the young Indian, and, placing
the boy on his own horse, he trudged ahead on foot—five,
ten, fifteen miles of it, the boy but half conscious
and freezing, the man tramping ahead, footsore, chilled
through, and troubled, the horse with hanging head and
lagging step—a strange trio to enter the Indian
camp.
From far off old Beaver-Tail
had seen the approaching bit of hated scarlet—the
tunic worn by the North-West Mounted Police—but
he made no comment as Corporal Manan lifted in his strong
arms the still figure from the saddle, and, carrying
it into the tepee, laid it beside the fire on the warm
wolf skins and buffalo hides. It took much heat and
nourishment before Little Wolf-Willow was able to interpret
the story from the Cree tongue into English, then back
again into Cree, and so be the go-between for the Corporal
and old Beaver-Tail. “Yes, my grandfather, Big
Wolf-Willow, is here,” said the boy, his dark
eyes looking fearlessly into the Corporal’s blue
ones. “He’s here, as you see, and I suppose
you will have to arrest him. H acknowledges he took
the cattle. He was poor, hungry, starving. You see,
Corporal, he cannot speak English, and he does not understand
the white men or their laws. He says for me to tell
you that the white men came and stole all our buffaloes,
the millions of beautiful animals that supplied us with
hides to make our tepees, furs to dress in, meat to
eat, fat to keep us warm; so he thought it no harm to
take two small calves when he was hungry. He asks if
anyone arrested and punished the white men who took
[Page 256] all his buffaloes, and,
if not, why should he be arrested and punished for doing
far less wrong than the wrong done by the white man?”
“But—but—”
stammered Corporal Manan. “I’m not after
him. It is you I was told to arrest.”
“Oh, why didn’t
I know? Why didn’t I know it was I you were after?”
cried the boy. “I would have let you take me,
handcuff me, anything, for I understand, but he does
not.”
Corporal Manan stood up, shaking
his shoulders as a big dog shakes after a plunge. Then
he spoke: “Little Wolf-Willow, can you ever forgive
us all for thinking you were a cattle-thief? When I
think of your grandfather’s story of the millions
of buffaloes he has lost, and those two paltry calves
he took for food, I make no arrests here. My captain
must do what he thinks best.”
“And you saved me from
freezing to death, and brought me home on your own horse,
when you were sent out to take me to prison!”
muttered the boy, turning to his soldier friend with
admiration.
But old Beaver-Tail interrupted.
He arose, held out his hand towards the once hated scarlet-coated
figure, and spoke the first words he had ever voiced
in English. They were, “North-West Mounted Police,
good man, he. Beaver-Tail’s friend.” [Page
257]
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