run for it

[excerpt]--------- "What do you see?" whispered Bopo.
When Olah did not answer he crept up to the flap and added his eye to the slit.  Then his heart turned to stone within him, for, hanging from a thorn bush at the edge of the clearing was a large square of red deerskin!

CHAPTER THREE

That piece of red deerskin hanging in the bushes meant only one thing.  The council had voted for the immediate destruction of the two boys.  The girl, Wawena, had failed.  It was but a matter of minutes, perhaps, before they would be led to the post, bound back to back, and left to the red tongues of flame reaching out to sear their quivering flesh!  The sun was down; it was dusk in the village.  One moment more might be too late!

Both boys threw themselves flat on their stomachs and peered under the bottom of the teepee.  There were guards in front preventing any escape in that direction.  There were, of course, others in the rear -- but they would see.  So, cautiously peering beneath the rear wall, the boys came face to face with -- Wawena.

She had waited long to get to them.  The sentry placed to watch the teepee at the back had gone for a chat with someone behind the next lodge, and she had found her chance.

"Everyone is at the council!" she cried in a whisper.  "Here, let me cut your bonds.  What, you are free?  There is no better time to escape than now!  I tried to get provisions to the canoe without being seen, but once the dogs got what I had placed, and another time there were too many children playing nearby for safety.  So there are no provisions.  Run to the river -- take your pick of the three canoes there--"

"But I don't understand!" said Olah.  "You hung out the signal on the bush, the red buckskin!  We though they had decided death--"

"No, not yet!  They are still debating!  And I didn't hang that skin up.  Old Buffalo Woman was dyeing leather for a dancing costume, and hung that up to dry.  I couldn't take it down without her seeing me.  But we must not talk any more.  The sentry may be back at any moment!  You have a clear path now!  Go!"

The two lads ducked out under the buffalo hide, and crouched ready to run, but Olah glanced back.  There sat Wawena as they had last seen her, slumped against the teepee like a sack.  Olah slipped back to her and hissed in her ear.

"Quick!  What are you sitting here for?" he gasped.  "Hurry!"

"No," she returned, "you'll need all your wits to beat them, and you can't afford to be hindered by a girl!  I will stay here!"

"No!" said Olah, roughly seizing her arm.  "If you won't go with us, we will remain.  That is final!"

Wawena saw that he meant it.  A look of intense joy came over her sad little face.

"All right," she said, stiffening her neck as one does before diving into icy water, "I'm with you!  Now run!"

At that moment a sudden flare of light shot from near the council lodge.  The flap had been thrown open, and the glow from within was reflected from the green brush outside.  There were voices, and the sound of thudding feet.  The council had ended!

But, whatever the verdict, the boys did not wait.  Three forms crept out from behind the teepee and shot toward the river bank.  The boys had started slowly to keep pace with the girl, but they soon found out that this was not needed.  She was as swift as a rabbit, and outdistanced them both by two lengths.  Over the bank!  A long slide down the clay side of it!  And there, on the gravelled shingle were the three canoes, bottom up.

Bopo picked the smallest and lightest hastily.  With Wawena's help he turned the craft over and launched it, while Olah was smashing the other canoe bottoms with a large rock.  Crash!  Creak! went the ripping birch bark and splintering wood shells of the fragile canoes.  A few well-aimed blows and they were out of commission.  No man could chase them on the water now.  But on land -- that was a different thing.

Two dogs, running along the river, saw them and began to bark.  The curs yelped and howled.  Wawena tried to quiet them, but through some sixth sense they knew that something was amiss in their village.  And, in answer to their yowlings, came a long wavering whoop from above.  Someone had discovered the escape!

Olah gave a hard kick to the shore as he leapt swiftly into the stern, and the agile boat shot outward like a startled duck from cover.

"The paddle, quickly," he hissed.  He heard Bopo rummaging in the bow, and then a silence.

"Didn't you find a paddle under those canoes?" Bopo demanded.  "There's none here!"

"Oh," cried Wawena under her breath, "I might have known.  They always take the paddles up to the teepees after dark!" and a silence, a dread silence, fell on all three.

Meanwhile the canoe was being taken by the current, and hurried along parallel to the shore but not far out.  Back at the landing a tall form rushed to the bank edge, stood silhouetted a moment against the sky, then dropped to the beach below.  A howl came, then shouts, and cries.  They had found the demolished canoes, had discovered one was missing.  Wawena listened.

"I hear Scar-Face," she whispered.  "That voice above all the rest.  He says that the canoe is drifting downstream, and for them all to get their bows and shoot from the bank!  But I also hear Red Wolf, and he is ordering them not to shoot!  But I know Scar-Face!  He will kill us all!  He will go to the buffalo ford!  Oh, we must have a paddle!" and she shivered in the bottom of the canoe with excitement and fear.

"I have it!" she cried at last.  "Not a paddle, but some good substitutes.  On the other side, if we can reach it, is a shallow pit where the women have been digging clay for cooking pots.  Their shovels are made of buffalo shoulder blades lashed to short poles, and they usually leave them in a cache at the side of the pit.  If we can reach it in time, they will make good paddles!"

Olah and Bopo were not Chippewa lads for nothing.  The canoe is the burdenbearer of the woodland Indian.  It is his horse, and his plaything.  And many a race had these boys run against each other on their home lakes, with paddles left behind.  So now they knelt on the bottom and, with hands slashing backward like the feet of a duck, little by little they edged the canoe in toward the other side.  It took Wawena little time to locate the pit in the darkness, and in a minute or two she appeared on the shore with four clumsy shovels in her arms.

"Nezesheen!" cried Olah.  "Good work!  You are a true Chippewa, because you think fast and not like the slow Bwanoz!"  So saying he took the largest for the stern, balancing it in his hand.  Bopo selected another, shorter in the handle, while with a smaller one Wawena crouched in the center and amidships.

"Now let them come," cried Olah, his head high, and feeling every inch a warrior.  "Now let them try to get us!  They are turtles, running on the land, but we are swift trout in the water.  We shall soon outdistance them!"
--------------------- [end excerpt]
from a children's book, long out-of-print, called Claws of the Thunderbird, written by Holling C. Holling.  Copyright 1928 by The P.F. Volland Company, "Joliet, U.S.A."

--------------------
When I read that now, (which I read when very young and heard read-aloud when even younger), it reminds me of the determined spirit of people I work with -- where, if one thing doesn't work you figure out something else to do and, as I heard someone say one day in his office, "Failure is not an option."

-----------At the front of the book there's an intro titled, "To the Reader":

All this happened many, many summers ago, before the heeled boot of the white man crunched the sanded shores of Kitchi Gami, Lake Superior.  Then the trails were run by soft moccasins that made no sound.  Then no bark of rifles disturbed the woods, and deer and moose went to their deaths heralded only by the twang of bowstring and the hiss of feathered shaft.  The smoke of coal fires spread no haze against the sun in those days, nor was there steel for knives, nor yellow lumber for houses.  Copper there was, and stone and bone and flint, and with these four things the Chippewa and the Sioux made weapons and hurled defiance, one at the other, across the forests and the plains.

If you look at a map, you may see Lake Superior, the Great Water, lying with his tail in Minnesota where now stands Duluth, with Superior, Wisconsin, on the opposite shore and a long sand island between....
...
There are others who say there was once a great battle fought, but when and where it was, nobody seems to agree.  Yet, when the fire has sunk to slumbering coals and the memories of old men wander along the misted trails, they will tell you that it was a great battle, a great battle, indeed!

I have never seen the Thunderbird, but there are those who have, for they will tell you so.  And when the thunder roars, and the loose bark flaps on the wigwam roof in the gale, and the rain seeks every opening, and forked lightning seethes in the black night -- then are the old women watchful, and the old men remember strange tales.  Then, for them, the Thunderbird flies once more!

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