Caddie Woodlawn (2 page)
Authors: Carol Ryrie Brink
22.
A Letter with a Foreign Stamp
In 1864 Caddie Woodlawn was eleven, and as wild a little tomboy as ever ran the woods of western Wisconsin. She was the despair of her mother and of her elder sister, Clara. But her father watched her with a little shine of pride in his eyes, and her brothers accepted her as one of themselves without a question. Indeed, Tom, who was two years older, and Warren, who was two years younger than Caddie, needed Caddie to link them together into an inseparable trio. Together they got in and out of more scrapes and adventures than any one of them could have imagined alone. And in those pioneer days, Wisconsin offered plenty
of opportunities for adventure to three wide-eyed, red-headed youngsters.
On a bright Saturday afternoon in the early fall, Tom and Caddie and Warren Woodlawn sat on a bank of the Menomonie River, or Red Cedar as they call it now, taking off their clothes. Their red heads shone in the sunlight. Tom's hair was the darkest, Caddie's the nearest golden, and nine-year-old Warren's was plain carrot color. Not one of the three knew how to swim, but they were going across the river nevertheless. A thin thread of smoke beyond the bend on the other side of the river told them that the Indians were at work on a birch-bark canoe.
“Do you think the Indians around here would ever get mad and massacre folks like they did up north?” wondered Warren, tying his shirt up in a little bundle.
“No, sir,” said Tom, “not these Indians!”
“Not Indian John, anyhow,” said Caddie. She had just unfastened the many troublesome little buttons on the back of her tight-waisted dress, and, before taking it off, she paused a moment to see if she could balance a fresh-water clam shell on her big toe. She found that she could.
“No, not Indian John!” she repeated decidedly, having got the matter of the clam shell off her mind. “Even if he does have a scalp belt,” she added. The thought
of the scalp belt always made her hair prickle delightfully up where her scalp lock grew.
“Naw,” said Tom, “the fellows who spread those massacree stories are just big-mouthed scared-cats who don't know the Indians, I guess.”
“Big-mouthed scared cats,” repeated Warren, admiring Tom's command of language.
“Big-mouthed scared-cats,” echoed a piping voice from the bank above. Seven-year-old Hetty, who fluttered wistfully on the outer edge of their adventures, filed away Tom's remark in her active brain. It would be useful to tell to Mother, some time when Mother was complaining about Tom's language. The three below her paid no attention to Hetty's intrusion. Their red heads, shining in the sunlight, did not even turn in her direction. Hetty's hair was red, too, like Father's, but somehow, in spite of her hair, she belonged on the dark-haired side of the family where Mother and Clara and all the safe and tidy virtues were. She poised irresolutely on the bank above the three adventurous ones. If they had only turned around and looked at her! But they were enough in themselves. She could not make up her mind what to do. She wanted to go with them, and yet she wanted just as much to run home and tell Mother and Clara what they were about to do. Hetty was the self-appointed
newsbearer of the family. Wild horses could not prevent her from being the first to tell, whatever it was that happened.
Tom and Caddie and Warren finished undressing, tied their clothes into tight bundles, and stepped out into the river. The water was low after a long, hot summer, but still it looked cold and deep. Hetty shuddered. She had started to undo one shoe, but now she quickly tied it up again. She had made up her mind. She turned around and flew across the fields to tell Mother.
Tom knew from experience that he could just keep his chin above water and touch bottom with his toes across the deep part of the river. It would have been over Caddie's and Warren's heads, but, if they held onto Tom and kept their feet paddling, they could just keep their heads above water. They had done it before. Tom went first with his bundle of clothes balanced on his head. Caddie came next, clutching Tom's shoulder with one hand and holding her bundle of clothes on top of her head with the other. Warren clung to Caddie's shoulder in the same manner, balancing his own clothes with his free hand. They moved slowly and carefully. If Tom lost his footing or fell, they would all go down together and be swept away by the current toward the village below. But the
other two had every confidence in Tom, and Tom had not the slightest reason to doubt himself. They looked like three beavers, moving silently across the currentâthree heads with three bundles and a little wake of ripples trailing out behind them. Last of all came Nero, the farm dog, paddling faithfully behind them. But Hetty was already out of sight.
Presently there was solid riverbed beneath their feet again. The three children scrambled out on the other side, shook themselves as Nero did, and pulled on their dry, wrinkled clothing.
“Hurry up, Caddie,” called Tom. “You're always the last to dress.”
“So would you be, too, Tom, if you had so many buttons!” protested Caddie. She came out of the bushes struggling with the back of her blue denim dress. Relenting, Tom turned his superior intelligence to the mean task of buttoning her up the back.
“I wish Mother'd let me wear boys' clothes,” she complained.
“Huh!” said Warren. “She thinks you're tomboy enough already.”
“But they're so much quicker,” said Caddie regretfully.
Now that they were dressed, they sped along the river bank in the direction of the smoke. Several Indian
canoes were drawn up on shore in the shelter of a little cove and beyond them in a clearing the Indians moved to and fro about a fire. Propped on two logs was the crude framework of a canoe which was already partly covered with birch bark. The smell of birch smoke and hot pitch filled the air. Caddie lifted her head and sniffed. It was perfume to her, as sweet as the perfume of the clover fields. Nero sniffed, too, and growled low in his throat.
The three children stopped at the edge of the clearing and watched. Even friendly Indians commanded fear and respect in those days. A lean dog, with a wolfish look, came forward barking.
He and Nero circled about each other, little ridges of bristling hair along their spines, their tails wagging suspiciously. Suddenly the Indian dog left Nero and came toward Caddie.
“Look!” said Caddie. “It's Indian John's dog.” The dog's tail began to wag in a friendlier manner, and Caddie reached out and patted his head.
By this time the Indians had noticed the children. They spoke among themselves and pointed. Some of them left their work and came forward.
In all the seven years since the Woodlawns had come from Boston to live in the big house on the prairie, the Indians had never got used to seeing them. White men and their children they had seen often
enough, but never such as these, who wore, above their pale faces, hair the color of flame and sunset. During the first year the children spent in Wisconsin, the Indians had come from all the country around to look at them. They had come in groups, crowding into Mrs. Woodlawn's kitchen in their silent moccasins, touching the children's hair and staring. Poor Mrs. Woodlawn, frightened nearly out of her wits, had fed them bread or beans or whatever she had on hand, and they had gone away satisfied.
“Johnny, my dear,” Mrs. Woodlawn had complained to her husband, “those frightful savages will eat us out of house and home.”
“Patience, Harriet,” said her husband, “we have enough and to spare.”
“But, Johnny, the way they look at the children's hair frightens me. They might want a red scalp to hang to their belts.”
Caddie remembered very vividly the day, three years before, when she had gone unsuspecting into the store in the village. As she went in the door, a big Indian had seized her and held her up in the air while he took a leisurely look at her hair. She had been so frightened that she had not even cried out, but hung there, wriggling in the Indian's firm grasp, and gazing desperately about the store for help.
The storekeeper had laughed at her, saying in a
reassuring voice: “You needn't be afraid, Caddie. He's a good Indian. It's Indian John.”
That was the strange beginning of a friendship, for a kind of friendship it was, that had grown up between Caddie and Indian John. The boys liked Indian John, too, but it was at Caddie and her red-gold curls that the big Indian looked when he came to the farm, and it was for Caddie that he left bits of oddly carved wood and once a dollâsuch a funny doll with a tiny head made of a pebble covered with calico, black horsehair braids, calico arms and legs, and a buckskin dress! John's dog knew his master's friends. Caddie had been kind to him and he accepted her as a friend.
He rubbed his head against her now as she patted his rough hair. Indian John left his work on the canoe and came forward.
“You like him dog?” he said, grinning. He was flattered when anyone patted his dog.
“Yes,” said Caddie, “he's a good dog.”
“Will you let us see how you put the canoe together?” asked Tom eagerly.
“You come look,” said the Indian.
They followed him to the half-finished canoe. Grunting and grinning, the Indians took up their work. They fastened the pliable sheaths of birch bark into place on the light framework, first sewing them together with buckskin thongs, then cementing them
with the hot pitch. The children were fascinated. Their own canoe on the lake was an Indian canoe. But it had been hollowed out of a single log. They had seen the birch-bark canoes on the river, but had never been so close to the making of one. They were so intent on every detail that time slipped by unheeded. Even the squaws, who came up behind them to examine their hair, did not take their attention from the building of the canoe. Caddie shook her head impatiently, flicking her curls out of their curious fingers, and went on watching.
But after a while Warren said: “Golly! I'm hungry.” Perhaps it was the odor of jerked venison, simmering over the fire, which had begun to mingle with the odors of birch and pitch, that made Warren remember he was hungry.
“You're always hungry,” said Tom, the lofty one, in a tone of disgust.
“Well, I am, too,” said Caddie positively, and that settled it. The sun was beginning to swing low in the sky, and, once they had made up their minds, they were off at once. As quickly as they had come, they returned along the river bank to their crossing place. The Indians stared after them. They did not understand these curious red and white children of the white man, nor how they went and came.
Soon three bundles, three dirty faces, and three fiery heads, shining in the red autumn sun, crossed the river with a little trail of ripples behind them. Safe on the other bank, the three hastily pulled on their clothes and started to take a short cut through the woods, Nero trotting at their heels.
“Hetty probably told Mother, and Mother may be mad at us for going across the river without asking her,” said Tom, beginning to turn his thoughts toward home.
“She never said we couldn't,” protested Warren.
“Well, maybe she hadn't thought of such a good way of getting across,” said Tom, doubtfully.
“Look!” said Caddie. She had stopped beside some hazel brush and was gazing at it with clasped hands. “Nuts! They're ready to pick.”
“They're green,” said Warren.
“No, they're just right to pick now, if we spread them on the woodshed roof to dry,” said Tom judicially. “But we haven't much time.” He began to fill his pockets. The others followed his exampleâonly Caddie, who had no pockets, caught up the edges of her skirt and made a bag of that. The boys' pockets were soon filled.
