Little Wolf-Willow

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 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.