Book: The Shagganappi

E >> E. Pauline Johnson >> The Shagganappi




"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."

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 old 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 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 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, 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 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 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 he saw what he thought 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."

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. He 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 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."

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