第30章 ON BOOKS ABOUT RED MEN(2)

Tanner often did this,and he would then dream how the Great Spirit appeared to him as a beautiful young man,and told him where he would find game,and prophesied other events in his life.It is curious to see a white man taking to the Indian religion,and having exactly the same sort of visions as their red converts described to the Jesuit fathers nearly two hundred years before.

Tanner saw some Indian ghosts,too,when he grew up.On the bank of the Little Saskawjewun there was a capital camping-place where the Indians never camped.It was called Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut--"the place of two Dead Men."Two Indians of the same totem had killed each other there.Now,their totem was that which Tanner bore,the totem of his adopted Indian mother.The story was that if any man camped there,the ghosts would come out of their graves;and that was just what happened.Tanner made the experiment;he camped and fell asleep."Very soon I saw the two dead men come and sit down by my fire opposite me.I got up and sat opposite them by the fire,and in this position I awoke."Perhaps he fell asleep again,for he now saw the two dead men,who sat opposite to him,and laughed and poked fun and sticks at him.He could neither speak nor run away.

One of them showed him a horse on a hill,and said,"There,my brother,is a horse I give you to ride on your journey home,and on your way you can call and leave the horse,and spend another night with us."So,next morning,he found the horse and rode it,but he did not spend another night with the ghosts of his own totem.He had seen enough of them.

Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit,he did not believe in those of his Indian mother.He thought she used to prowl about in the daytime,find tracks of a bear or deer,watch where they went to,and then say the beast's lair had been revealed to her in a dream.But Tanner's own visions were "honest Injun."Once,in a hard winter,Tanner played a trick on the old woman.All the food they had was a quart of frozen bears'grease,kept in a kettle with a skin fastened over it.But Tanner caught a rabbit alive and popped him under the skin.So when the old woman went for the bears'grease in the morning,and found it alive,she was not a little alarmed.

But does not the notion of living on frozen pomatum rather take the gilt off the delight of being an Indian?The old woman was as brave and resolute as a man,but in one day she sold a hundred and twenty beaver skins and many buffalo robes for rum.She always entertained all the neighbouring Indians as long as the rum lasted,and Tanner had a narrow escape of growing up a drunkard.He became such a savage that when an Indian girl carelessly allowed his wigwam to be burned,he stripped her of her blanket and turned her out for the night in the snow.

So Tanner grew up in spite of hunger and drink.Once,when starving,and without bullets,he met a buck moose.If he killed the moose he would be saved,if he did not he would die.So he took the screws out of the lock of his rifle,loaded with them in place of bullets,tied the lock on with string,fired,and killed the moose.

Tanner was worried into marrying a young squaw (at least he says he did it because the girl wanted it),and this led to all his sorrows--this and a quarrel with a medicine-man.The medicine-man accused him of being a wizard,and his wife got another Indian to shoot him.

Tanner was far from surgeons,and he actually hacked out the bullet himself with an old razor.Another wounded Indian once amputated his own arm.The ancient Spartans could not have been pluckier.

The Indians had other virtues as well as pluck.They were honest and so hospitable,before they knew white men's ways,that they would give poor strangers new mocassins and new buffalo cloaks.

Will it bore you,my dear Dick,if I tell you of an old Indian's death?It seems a pretty and touching story.Old Pe-shau-ba was a friend of Tanner.One day he fell violently ill.He sent for Tanner and said to him:"I remember before I came to live in this world,I was with the Great Spirit above.I saw many good and desirable things,and among others a beautiful woman.And the Great Spirit said:'Pe-shau-ba,do you love the woman?'I told him Idid.Then he said,'Go down and spend a few winters on earth.You cannot stay long,and you must remember to be always kind and good to my children whom you see below.'So I came down,but I have never forgotten what was said to me.

"I have always stood in the smoke between the two bands when my people fought with their enemies ...I now hear the same voice that talked to me before I came into the world.It tells me I can remain here no longer."He then walked out,looked at the sun,the sky,the lake,and the distant hills;then came in,lay down composedly in his place,and in a few minutes ceased to breathe.

If we would hardly care to live like Indians,after all (and Tanner tired of it and came back,an old man,to the States),we might desire to die like Pe-shau-ba,if,like him,we had been "good and kind to God's children whom we meet below."So here is a Christmas moral for you,out of a Red Indian book,and I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.