Part 21

Smiling to himself, Leonardo went out into the fields and hunted about until he had collected a large number of strange creatures, hedgehogs, lizards, locusts, snakes, and many others. These he carried home and locked up in the room he used for a workshop, where no one was allowed to enter but himself. Using the ugly things as models, he began to paint on the shield a monster formed out of all the creatures, with eyes and legs everywhere. It was a long time before he succeeded in making anything frightful enough to suit him. Again and again he erased his work and did it over, trying to combine his creatures differently. But at last something so terrible stared him in the face that he almost felt frightened himself.

"The monster is ready," he said with a laugh; "but I must find a background fitting for him."

So he painted as a background a black and narrow cavern, at whose mouth stood the shapeless creature he had made, all eyes, all legs, all savage jaws. Flames poured from it on every side, and a cloud of vapor rose upwards from its many nostrils. After days of hard work, Leonardo at last went to his father and told him he had finished the shield, which he hoped would please its owner. Ser Piero came at once, and was led into the partly darkened studio, where in just the right light the shield stood on an easel. But no sooner was the father within the room than he turned to fly, so terrible was the object that met his gaze.

"It will do, I see," said Leonardo. "I wanted to make something so dreadful that everyone would shiver with fear at the sight of it. Take it away with you now; but I had better wrap it up, or you will frighten people out of their wits as you go along."

Ser Piero took the shield and went away without telling his son anything about old Francisco. But he was quite sure that the farmer would not like the picture, and that it was not at all suitable to hang in a farmhouse kitchen; and more than that, he felt it was far too wonderful a painting to fall into the hands of a peasant and never be famous. So in order to save the old man's feelings, he went to a shop and bought a shield of the same size as the first one, which had on it a device of a heart pierced by an arrow; and the next time he went to the country he sent for Francisco to come and get it.

"Oh, your Excellency, how beautiful!" cried the old man in delight, as he received his shield after his long waiting.

"I thought you would be pleased," answered Ser Piero, thinking to himself how frightened rather than pleased the farmer would have been with Leonardo's monster.

--_Adapted from "The Strange Story Book", by Andrew Lang._

QUESTIONS

This selection consists of three parts. Where does each part end? Write an appropriate title for each part.

CIVIL DEATH

All should begin reading at the same moment. Can you after one minute give a good account of the meaning of _civil death_?

According to law a person may be alive and enjoying good health and still under certain conditions be dead to all his civil rights. In some states, as New York, this is true of one sentenced to the state prison for life; all his civil rights are taken from him and to the world he is as dead. In all states, absence for a specified time without any knowledge of the whereabouts of the individual renders him legally dead to his civil rights; this period is in most states seven years. Supposing A, living in Wisconsin, should leave his home and family and go to Alaska. If at the end of seven years no word had been received from him, the law assumes him to be dead; his estate can be settled by probate, provided the family consents, and his wife may legally marry again. Should he afterwards return he could not compel the court to restore his estate or family; these are legally forfeited, beyond all redress.

--_From "The World Book". Courtesy of W. F. Quarrie & Co._

OTELNE, THE INDIAN OF THE GREAT NORTH WOODS

In the "movies" you have surely seen pictures of the Far North--Alaska or northern Canada, or even the northern United States--with the brave, rough men who live about mining or lumber camps or trading posts. In many of the pictures, you remember, there have been Indians. Here is an account of the life of those Indians when they are away from the trading posts.

At the end of this story you will find an outline partly made out. After you have read the story through, compare it with the outline, and fill in the topics left blank under _a_, _b_, _c_, etc. You may add more sub-topics if you think you need them.

When white men first came to America, they thought it was a country called India of which they had often heard. So they called the people they found here Indians. They also called them red men, because they were about the color of a copper cent that has been carried a while. These red men did not have many tools and other things to make it easy to work and to live. They had no horses, cows, pigs, sheep or chickens, so they had to catch wild animals for food. They had no guns nor rifles, but made spears and bows and arrows with which to kill their game. They had no iron. Their arrow points and spear heads were of sharpened stone, as was a heavy tool they made something like our hatchet. It was a very dull, poor hatchet. They had no cloth to make clothes. Instead, they used the skins of wild animals they caught or shot with their bows and arrows. Instead of houses they had tents or wigwams made of skins. The Indians thought the white men's things were wonderful, and they were much pleased to trade furs and game for blankets, guns, powder, and bullets. The Indians like bright, pretty things, so they were very fond of trading for beads to make necklaces and ornaments for their suits.

After a long time, the white men took most of the Indians' country, but there is still a large part of North America where there are more Indians than white men. This is far to the north in Canada, in a wide strip between the towns and farms of the white men and the cold, snow land of the Eskimos. The soldiers who have been to the Great War tell us much about England, France, and Germany; but the country where the Indians still have their hunting grounds is larger than all of these countries put together. The region is covered with evergreen forests, a great silent land of deep snow and trees and cold. It is too cold and rocky for the white man to make farms, so he has not cut down the trees. There are no cities nor houses, nothing but forests where the Indian hunts game and lives in his tent as he has always lived.

To trade with these Indians, the white men have built stores in the edge of the Indian country. They are called Posts--Trading Posts. When the warm days of June come and the ice is all melted, the keeper of a Post begins to look up the river watching for canoes to come around the bend. At last he sees one. In front sits an Indian woman paddling, and in the stern of the canoe sits Otelne, her husband, paddling and also steering. They are coming to the post to trade. In the middle of the boat are a boy, a girl, a brand new baby, and a dog. The boy's name is Akusk (arrow); the girl's name is Wabogum (flower). The baby's name is Wabshish (little white hare). He is tied to a board to keep him safe and warm. The canoe contains one more thing, very precious, a big bundle of fur skins. This is the wages of a whole year, the result of a hard winter's work in the forest.

The keeper of the Post shakes hands with Otelne. Otelne opens the bale of furs, and the first afternoon he and his wife trade a few muskrat skins for some flour, beans, bacon and canned peaches. Then the Indians camp and have a feast. Other canoes come down the river bringing other families until the post becomes a great picnic ground. They talk over the happenings of the winter, of getting lost in storms, of upsetting their canoes, of falling through the ice, of the bears they have caught, and the wolves that have chased them. They wonder what has happened to the Indians who do not come back. They have canoe races and the different families, or tribes, play match games of la crosse. This game, which the white men learned from the Indians, is now the national game of Canada, as baseball is of the United States.

In August the trading is over, and the Indians start back to the hunting grounds for another year's work. The canoe is loaded full. Instead of the bale of furs, Otelne has in his canoe a new tent, a sheet-iron stove, some stove pipe, twenty-five steel traps, a rifle, one thousand cartridges, fish hooks and fishing line, a wood saw, knives, axes, buckets, blankets, and a lot of white men's clothes. He did not buy any shoes because he would rather have the moccasins he makes himself.

It is hard work to paddle the heavy load up the river against the swift current. Presently they hear the roaring noise of a waterfall where the stream jumps down over some rocks. The canoe cannot pass this, so they all get out and carry the canoe and all its load, bit by bit, along a little path that leads to the quiet water above the falls. Here they load the canoe again and paddle on, but they soon come to another carrying place, or portage as it is called, and have to unload again. They are not afraid to leave their belongings while they go back to the foot of the falls, for no Indian would think of stealing anything he found in this way.

You can see why the Indians do not use white men's boats, for no white man's boat is as light as the birch bark canoe. You can also see why they do not take much food from the post. They cannot carry it and all they need for camping and hunting too. They must have the tent and traps, so they take only food enough to last until they get far enough from the post to find game.

After a few days' journey they leave the main stream and go up one of its branches. Here they come to a place where the stream widens into a lake. The water is very still, and as the fishing is good, the Indians camp here for a week and rest. There are so many wolves and wild cats in the woods that Otelne puts up the tent on a little island out in the middle of the lake.

For many days they go on upstream. Over and over again they have to carry their goods around rapids. The dark branches of spruce, hemlock, and fir trees often hang over the stream.

Trout, pickerel, and other fish dart in behind the rocks around which the currents flow. Sometimes a muskrat, a beaver, or an otter swims quickly into his hole in the bank. But sometimes the rifle is too quick for him and the Indians have fresh meat for supper. Each day they pass the mouths of little streams and the main stream gets smaller and smaller, till at last it is hardly more than a brook.

They are busy nearly all the time carrying their supplies around rapids. At last they can go no farther in the canoe because the stream has grown too small and rocky. To go still farther in their direction, the Indians must find a stream which flows the opposite way. To find this stream they must cross a hill, because, you see, the water will run down the hill on the other side, gathering more and more water, and getting larger as it goes. This water parting is called a divide, or watershed. There is such a divide at the top of every mountain range. For instance, all the rivers flowing east of the Alleghany Mountains run east to the Atlantic Ocean; all those flowing west run finally into the Mississippi River. So the Alleghany Mountains are a divide.

Otelne knows of one place where the streams bend in such a way that he can, in an hour, carry his canoe from canoe-water on one stream to canoe-water on the stream over the hill. The Indians know where these good portages are just as country boys know where they can catch rabbits, or as city boys know where they can find a place to play. For many days, Otelne steers his canoe down stream, camping on the bank each night.

In late October the first snow falls. They camp beside the lonely river, and the fur hunting begins in earnest. Otelne fixes a round of traps. He starts away from his tent and makes a large circle in the forest, fixing a round of traps as he goes. When he cannot see the sun, he keeps his direction through the forest by noticing the moss which grows only on the shady side of a tree trunk. He can keep his direction at night, too, if he can see the stars, for long before white men came, Indians had noticed that one star always seemed to be in the same place. They call it the "Great Star". We call it the "North Star". The pointers in the Great Dipper show us where it is. Otelne watches them every clear night.

Twenty miles he travels, setting his traps wherever he sees in the snow the tracks of the animals he wants. He drags sweet-smelling meat along the snow, hoping that animals crossing this trail will follow it to the traps. After a day or two, he goes around again, putting fresh bait on his traps and taking out the animals he has caught. After several rounds, he finds that game is getting scarce here, so he and his wife put the tent and all their things on two toboggans (sleds), tuck the baby down in the blankets, and trudge all day through the forest. When night comes they put up the tent on the snow, cut evergreen boughs to make a thick carpet, and build a fire in the sheet-iron stove. All winter long they move every two or three weeks, finding a new camp whenever a new hunting-ground is necessary.

Can you see Otelne as he visits his traps? He walks on snow shoes to keep from sinking into the snow which is now three feet deep. His big dog pulls a toboggan on which is an axe, a package of raw smoked meat in a little box of birch bark, and a roll of blankets. Akusk, the twelve-year-old boy, goes with his father, from whom he learns all the Indian arts and the ways of the animals in the forest. It is all the schooling he ever gets. How would you like to get your schooling that way?

The first trap is empty and the bait gone, so Otelne puts fresh bait in it. The second trap holds a fine mink, dead and frozen stiff. His skin is worth ten dollars. The fifth trap has in it the foot of a muskrat and some scraps of fur lying around. Some hungry animal has raided the trap, and the big dog, Wagush, smells the trail, whines, and jumps about so that he upsets the sled. Otelne turns him loose, and away he goes yelping through the forest, until at last his regular baying tells Otelne that he has treed the animal. It is a lynx. The rifle brings him down and he is placed on the sled along with the mink.

At nightfall, ten miles from the tent, they come to a shelter made of boughs. When Otelne set the traps, he built this shelter to keep off the cold wind, for he knew he would have to sleep here on bitter cold nights. He builds a roaring fire in front of the shelter. They eat the mink, give the scraps and bones to Wagush, wrap up in rabbit-skin blankets, and lie down with their heads toward the shelter, their feet toward the fire, and the dog beside them. Two hours later Wagush wakes them with a growl. Two wolves are prowling around in the spruce trees, but wolves fear fire, so Otelne throws on more wood and they slink away. At dawn the Indians are up and on their way to the rest of the traps.

They kill a bear. This is great luck, for now they have meat enough to last for weeks. Even with the help of Akusk and Wagush, Otelne has hard work to drag that bear on the toboggan six miles back to the tent. All three are so weary they have to rest all the next day. Sulian, the mother, who skins the animals, takes care of the skins and smokes the meat. That is her part of the work. You may be sure that the children are glad to see their father and brother come back, for there isn't another family within twenty miles, nor is there one white man within a hundred miles.

Day after day, through the long, cold winter, Otelne and his family hunt the fur that they can trade for the white man's tools and supplies. When the trapping season ends, Otelne is four hundred miles from the post, and it takes many weeks of canoeing to get back there for summer trading. They carry with them a bundle of smoked meat to eat where game or fish cannot be found.

Each year Indian families go out for furs and never come back. The canoe may upset and swift water carry away all their things. Sometimes they get lost and freeze to death in terrible blizzards. The hunting may be bad, so they starve. The father may be drowned or break his leg and freeze to death away out in the forest. Then the mother cannot get enough game to keep the children alive, so they all starve and the wolves eat them. The fur gatherer has a hard, cold life in the far North, but it is better than it used to be before he traded with the white man and got guns, knives, traps, and fish hooks.

When all goes well with the fur gatherer, the boys and girls in the little tent play many games. They are fond of checkers. To make a checker-board, they split a piece of wood out of a log, smooth one side of it with an axe, mark it into squares with a knife, and blacken some of them with charcoal. For men, they saw off short pieces of a stick as thick as your thumb. Jackstraws is another favorite game, but the straws are tiny canoe paddles, knives, guns, snowshoes, snow shovels, and canoes, all whittled out of wood, making a queer looking pile. They have one campfire game in which they shake up eight disks of bone in a bowl. This game is so hard to learn that my friend, Professor Speck, spent three days learning it, and the rules for counting the score would fill three pages of a book like this one. This game, so hard to learn, shows that the Indian would be as smart as the white man if he had a chance to learn the same things. White men who hunt with the Indians like them and say they are good companions.

The white men from the trading posts bring the furs down to our great cities, where they are made into mittens and muffs and coats and ladies' furs, and the next winter, while the Indian is back in the forest following his traps, we can see people wearing the furs in almost any part of the United States.

--_J. Russell Smith. Courtesy of The John C. Winston Co._

OUTLINE

1. Early life of the Indians.

2. Their present home in the North.

3. A visit to the trading post. (_a_) Who came (_b_) (_c_)

4. The Indians' return. (_a_) (_b_)

5. The life of a trapper. (_a_) (_b_) (_c_) (_d_)

6. Games.

QUESTIONS

1. The setting of a story tells the place of the story, when it occurs, and who are the actors. Your teacher will ask one of you to give the setting of "Otelne, the Indian of the Great North Woods".

2. If you were an Indian boy or girl, how do you think you would feel during the winter about the summer trip to the trading post?

3. How does the trading post help the Indians? Make a list of things they buy. What can you think of that the author of the story did not mention? What else besides the cost will the Indians have to think of when deciding whether or not to buy anything?

4. Tell about the trip back into the woods after visiting the post. Why do they go so far?

5. Tell the story of a visit to the trap with Otelne as if you were Akusk. Don't be afraid to put in probable incidents not told by the author.

WHICH IS RIGHT?

Arrange your papers with your name and grade on the first line; place the date and your room or teacher's name on the second line; leave the third line blank, and, beginning with the fourth line, number the lines from one to seven. This exercise is to help you to read quickly and accurately. See that you understand all the directions in each problem before you try to carry them out. On the other hand, work as quickly as you can.

1. How am I to sing your praise Happy chimney-corner days, Sitting safe in nursery nooks Reading picture story-books. (_Stevenson--"Picture Books in Winter."_)

If this is a picture of play, draw a horseshoe on the first line. If it is a picture of quiet, draw a hitching-post.

2. The long war with the Danes had left England without law and order. Trade and commerce had almost ceased to exist. The monasteries and churches were in ruins and the schools nearly all destroyed.

Which of the words below best states the cause of this destruction?

Famine Trade War Disease

Write your answer on the _second_ line.

3. The axle in breaking had thrown the full weight of the heavy cart upon the body of the unconscious boy. Although there were many willing hands ready to help, none could lift the weight. Jean saw the crowd and hurried to the spot. Bracing himself, he placed his massive shoulders against the side of the cart. Slowly but surely it lifted and the child was drawn safely from beneath.

Which of the following words best describes Jean?

kind thoughtful strong brave good

Write your answer on the third line.

4. If you think after reading this paragraph that it is easy to land a trout, write the word _hard_ on the fourth line. If you think it is hard, write the word _easy_ there.

Trout fishing in mountain streams is said to be the greatest sport in the world. When a trout has been caught on the hook, it is usually a question of which will tire first, the fish or the fisherman. Often the fish will get the best of it and the fisherman be forced to go home with a broken rod and no fish for his pains.

5. If in the following words _c_ is found with _h_ more often than with _r_, write _church_ on the fifth line. But if _c_ is found more often with _r_, write _crown_ there.

checkers cruller bench candy crunch

6. On the sixth line write any words in this sentence which have the same number of letters as the fourth word of the sentence, but which have no letters in common.

7. If a soldier wears out a pair of shoes every month, how many pairs of shoes will be needed for a regiment of 3000 men for a year of service?

Write the answer on the seventh line.

"VERDUN BELLE"

This is the story of Verdun Belle, a trench dog, who adopted a young leatherneck, followed him to the edge of the battle around Chateau-Thierry and was waiting for him when they carried him out. It is a true story.

Belle was a setter, shabby white, with great splotches of chocolate brown in her coat. Her ears were brown and silken. She was under size and would not have stood a chance among the haughtier breeds shown in splendor at dog shows in Madison Square Garden. But the marines in the regiment to which she attached herself thought there never was a dog like her since the world began.

No one in the regiment knew whence she came or why. When she joined the outfit in a _sector_ near Verdun, she singled out one of the privates as her very own and attached herself to him for the duration of the war. The young marine would talk long and earnestly to her, and every one declared that Belle could "_comprè_" English.

She used to curl up at his feet when he slept or follow silently to keep him company at the _listening post_. She would sit hopefully in front of him whenever he settled down with his laden _mess kit_, which the cooks always heaped extra high in honor of Belle.