Three Adventure Tales

by Ruth Chew

  The strangers walked in slowly, one at a time.

  The strangers entered the big house. They were carrying their weapons, and they held their heads high, but they wouldn’t look anybody in the eye. The last to come in was their chief, Strong-Stone, walking between Wise-Defender and White-Otter.

  Strong-Stone was painted all over in fierce designs of black and red. He, too, held his head high, but he glared at everybody.

  The women in the house were soon busy heating stones to boil their vegetables and cornmeal and putting chunks of meat to cook over the blazing coals. As soon as any food was ready, the guests were served. At first they seemed shy about eating, but once they started, the strangers began to smile and talk to the women who were serving them. After he’d finished a large serving of roast beaver-tail, even Strong-Stone stopped glaring.

  When all the people in the house had eaten their fill, the floor was spread with soft skins for the guests to sleep on. Before long they lay down beside their bows and arrows and went to sleep.

  Max and Terry shared Red-Arrow’s corner of his cousins’ apartment with him and Wise-Defender. They fell asleep as soon as they lay down.

  Early next morning, Wise-Defender whispered in Terry’s ear, “Wake up!”

  Terry opened her eyes and sat up.

  Still whispering, Wise-Defender said, “You must fill a large bowl with water and get it so hot that it steams. Don’t let anybody drop any food into it. I want you and Max to wash your hair, your face, and any skin that’s not hidden by your clothes. Try not to let anyone see you doing this. Stay here until I send for you.” Wise-Defender walked away.

  Max and Red-Arrow were still sleeping. Everyone else in the house was fast asleep, too.

  Terry saw that a few embers were glowing in last night’s cooking fire. She added sticks and dry grass from a pile and blew on the red embers until they burst into flame. Then she pushed stones into the fire and threw bigger logs onto it.

  She set a big wooden bowl near the fire and filled it from a container of water. When the water began to steam, Terry held her hands over it until they were damp. She rubbed the dirt off them. Then she leaned over the bowl and let the steam drift over her face and her hair. She had to keep adding stones to the bowl to keep it boiling. She rubbed and steamed as much of herself as she could. She didn’t have a mirror, so she decided to wake Max.

  Terry put her finger on Max’s lips.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Sh-sh! Just tell me if I’ve got all the dirt off myself,” Terry said.

  It was all Max could do to keep from yelling, but he managed to whisper. “Are you nuts?”

  “Wise-Defender told me to get washed,” Terry explained. “He wants you to get cleaned up, too. I guess he’s ashamed of us. We are pretty dirty.”

  Most of the day Wise-Defender was in a meeting with White-Otter and Strong-Stone. They sat around the fire in White-Otter’s living space. They talked in loud, angry voices. Everybody else in the big house was very quiet. They were listening to what the chiefs had to say.

  Terry and Max stayed in Red-Arrow’s corner of his cousins’ apartment. They were now both as clean as they could get without soap. Terry stared at her brother. “I’d forgotten how blond your hair is.”

  Max laughed. “You should see yourself. You’re pink! And that makes your eyes greener.” They stopped talking to listen to the chiefs. They wanted to know what had happened in the woods the night before to stop Strong-Stone’s attack.

  Nobody spoke of that. Instead the two chiefs argued about hunting and fishing territories, about planting fields and berry patches. They seemed to say the same things over and over.

  Sometimes Wise-Defender would suggest something. Neither of the chiefs wanted to listen to him.

  Wise-Defender left them and went to where Max and Terry were waiting for him. “Come with me,” he said.

  He led them to where the two chiefs were still arguing. Wise-Defender held up his hand. “Stop! I want you to meet these messengers who came to save you from the horrors of war.”

  The chiefs were seated on the ground by the fire. They took one look at the children standing over them and then seemed even more terrified than Singing-Moon when she first saw them.

  Terry had acted in a school play about Greek gods. “Foolish mortals,” she growled in a deep voice. “Listen to your wise friend, before disaster strikes!” Max folded his arms and looked stern.

  Wise-Defender kneeled before the children. “Have mercy! Do not destroy these good men. Give them a chance to learn to share the gifts of nature.”

  Terry was having so much fun that she would have gone on talking, but Max dragged his sister away.

  Wise-Defender sat on the ground facing the two chiefs and suggested that they should go fishing on different days. Strong-Stone said he’d fish on the first day after the full moon. White-Otter liked the second day. Before long they found ways to solve all their problems.

  Wise-Defender brought out a clay pipe with a copper bowl. The two leaders smoked the Pipe of Peace together.

  Terry and Max went back to find Red-Arrow in his cousins’ living quarters.

  “Please tell us what happened last night,” Terry begged.

  Red-Arrow grinned. “Wise-Defender took along a sackful of ropes. Each time one of our men surprised one of theirs and aimed a spear or an arrow at him, another one of our men would lasso, gag, and tie him up. Then Wise-Defender told him all we wanted was a peace talk. If he promised to come peacefully, we would let him keep his weapons and give him food and shelter.

  “I don’t know how he did it, but Wise-Defender got everyone, even their chief, to agree to his terms.”

  Red-Arrow took a good look at Max and Terry. “You look different,” he said. “If I didn’t know you, I’d be scared.”

  Paddling down the river was much quicker than paddling up had been. The canoe followed the current. It rained on the third day. After sunset the rain turned to snow. In the morning the sky was clear, but the air was colder.

  Very early on the fifth day, Red-Arrow steered into the wide bay.

  Max jumped from the boat onto the narrow beach, carrying his sack. He helped Wise-Defender get ashore with his things. Then Terry threw her sack onto the beach and leaped after it.

  Red-Arrow wanted to be home before the river froze. He waved good-bye. The others started up the cliff. It had been snowing, and the path was hard to find.

  At the top, the snow on the level ground was much deeper. It reached to Terry’s knees. Her sack was dragging.

  Wise-Defender opened it and pulled out the three paddles she had been lugging, and then took the three others from Max’s pack. Terry stood on one foot at a time and leaned on Max while Wise-Defender tied paddles to her ankles with wide strips of rawhide.

  Max saw that they were snowshoes. He helped Wise-Defender tie a pair on himself, and then Wise-Defender helped Max.

  The sacks were lighter now, and the three of them could walk across the snow as if it were a carpet. They followed the path to the Leni-Lenape village. Singing-Moon and Blackbird-on-the-Wing were so happy to see them that they ran to tell the news to everyone.

  The big drum started to beat. The people danced till the snow was pounded flat. They were still singing when Max and Terry fell asleep.

  When Max woke, he caught sight of his sneakers, T-shirt, and shorts under the bench he had been sleeping on.

  Suddenly Max felt like putting on his old clothes. After he was dressed, he shook his sister. Terry sat up and stared at him.

  “Why are you wearing your shorts?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Max said. “I was just thinking about the sweat lodge. This would be a good time to explore it. Everyone’s asleep.”

  Max handed Terry her old clothes. “Put these on. We won’t need our deerskin clothing now.”

  Terry changed into her shirt, shorts, and red sneakers. She followed Max out of the little house and through the sleeping village to the sweat lo
dge. Max lifted the dome off the hole and went after Terry down a set of steps to the lodge below.

  No steaming leaves were here now. The clay floor was swept clean. The ceiling was too low for them to stand, and somehow they couldn’t find the steps they had come in by.

  There must be another entrance to the lodge. They made their way toward a faint green glow, which seemed to be at the end of a long tunnel.

  At last Terry and Max crawled out into bright sunshine. They turned to look at the tunnel, but it was gone.

  They were in their own yard. The back door of the house opened. Their mother and father came out.

  Mr. Robertson looked at Max and Terry. “Your mother was worried about leaving you alone, but I see we weren’t gone long enough for you kids to get into trouble.”

  “Your dad changed his mind about building a wall when he found out how much it would cost,” Mrs. Robertson told them.

  “I’m going to build a stockade fence instead,” Mr. Robertson said.

  “Coming in here was a great idea, Mandy. It was awfully hot in the park.”

  Will Corrigan looked around. “Wow! What a high ceiling!”

  “Maybe that’s why this room is so nice and cool,” Amanda said.

  Will walked over to a large glass case. “Look at these things.”

  His sister stared at a little fringed leather skirt in the case. For a minute she didn’t speak. Then she said in a low voice, “Will, I just thought of something weird!”

  “What do you mean?” her brother asked.

  “Think about it, Will. Every one of these things belonged to an Indian long ago,” Amanda told him.

  Will scratched his head. “You’re right. It is kind of spooky. I guess that’s a real moccasin next to the tomahawk over there.” He turned and looked hard at his sister. “Mandy, did you know this stuff was here?”

  Amanda grinned. “I thought you’d like it. We all did.”

  “You mean,” Will said, “you’ve been to the Brooklyn Museum before?”

  “Mrs. Coleman brought our class here last spring,” Amanda told her brother. “Isn’t it a great place?”

  Will moved to the next case. “There’s more Indian stuff here, but this is different.”

  “These things were made by another set of Indians. They lived on the plains.” Amanda was two years older than Will. It was fun to show off how much she knew about Indians.

  On one side of the room there were five enormous wooden poles. They were covered with carvings of birds and people and animals, one on top of the other. All the carvings had big eyes and big beaks or mouths. Most of them had heads that seemed too large for their bodies.

  “Totem poles!” Will went over to look at them.

  Amanda ran after her brother.

  Will was staring up at the totem poles. Now something else caught his eye. “Hey, look at those! Wow!” He ran to the center of the room. Four giant wooden statues stood on tall stands. The stands were right in front of stone pillars that reached to the ceiling.

  Will climbed on the base of the nearest pillar. From here he could see the top of a stand that held one of the wooden statues. “What do you know? There’s a mirror here!”

  Will leaned far over and looked down into the mirror. “Mandy, this is really weird!”

  Her brother kept staring down into the mirror. Amanda climbed up beside him to see what was so interesting. “It’s a black mirror,” she said.

  The mirror showed the beautiful carving on the statue’s underside, but everything around the statue in the mirror seemed dark and strange. Amanda thought she could see trees and water. Suddenly the air smelled salty, and she could hear gulls screaming. It made her think of Coney Island.

  Amanda took a deep breath and looked up. There was the big wooden statue, but it looked quite different now.

  The statue wasn’t old and cracked anymore. It was painted red and black and looked almost new. And there was no sign of the stone pillar.

  Will grabbed his sister’s arm. “Mandy,” he whispered. “We’re not in the museum anymore!”

  Secretly Amanda was glad to have her brother beside her, but she didn’t want him to know she was afraid.

  “What’s happened to us, Mandy?” Will asked.

  Amanda thought hard. “Somehow we must have gotten into magic,” she told him.

  Will was quiet for a little while. Then he said, “I always thought magic would be fun, but it’s scary.”

  Amanda looked around. High overhead sea birds were flying in wide circles. She felt sand under her feet. A gray sea slapped against the rocky shore.

  “Look, Will,” she said. “Aren’t those houses?”

  Will shaded his eyes against the afternoon sunlight and looked down the beach. “Maybe they’re sheds or boat houses. I don’t see any windows, but there are some more carved poles.”

  Across the water Amanda could see woods and a mountain. “This must be a bay. What a beautiful place!”

  The mountain was very different from the rolling green mountains where Amanda and Will had gone to camp last summer.

  This mountain poked a rocky point out of a thick forest of tall, dark green trees. Soft clouds drifted around it.

  A cool breeze was blowing from the water.

  “I don’t know where we are,” Will said, “but I like it here. It’s just as cool as it was in the museum.”

  Along the shore the trees were bright green and smaller than the forest trees.

  Amanda pointed at a patch of scraggly bushes. “Will, I think those are raspberries!”

  “What are we waiting for?” Will raced across the sand. Amanda ran after him.

  Will stared at the berries on the bushes. “They’re bigger than raspberries, and they’re orange. I wonder if they’re good to eat.” He reached out to pick one.

  Before Will could touch the berry, the two children heard a voice yell, “Stop!”

  “You’d better not touch those berries!” A boy wearing only a shirt of woven fiber stepped from behind a willow tree.

  “Oh!” Amanda tried not to stare at him. “Will they poison us?”

  The boy seemed to be older than Will, but not quite as old as Amanda. He looked at them with bright, dark eyes. Then he laughed. “Where have you been all your lives? Don’t you know you can’t pick berries from somebody else’s patch?”

  “We didn’t know anybody owned this land,” Will said.

  “This berry patch belongs to the family of our neighbor, Crooked Toe Eagle. I don’t want him to think I’ve been taking his berries. He’s so greedy he’d probably claim the right to take fish from our stream.” The boy was looking at Will’s and Amanda’s clothes now. “You’re strangers. What are your names?”

  “I’m Amanda,” she told him. “And this is my brother, Will.”

  The boy pushed a strand of straight black hair out of his eyes. “I’ve never heard those names before. What do they mean?”

  “Mom said my name is short for William and means ‘bold defender,’ and Mandy’s name means ‘lovable’—which she isn’t always.” Will grinned.

  “What’s your name?” Amanda asked.

  “Fox-of-the-Water,” the boy said.

  “Why did your parents give you such a name?” Will wanted to know.

  “It was my mother’s grandfather’s name. He died before I was born,” Fox-of-the-Water told them.

  “Mandy’s named after Mom’s grandmother,” Will said. “But why did your great-grandfather have a name like that?”

  “He was named after an uncle who died before he was born. It’s an old family name. Long ago someone was saved from drowning by one of the fox people. There’s a song about it that we sometimes sing.”

  Fox-of-the-Water looked at the sun. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I ought to be working now. If you want berries, come and help me pick our salmon berries. They’re just as good as these of old Crooked Toe Eagle.” He went back to the willow tree.

  “Mandy,” Will whispered, “he’
s just like the picture of an Indian I saw in my social studies book.”

  Amanda nodded. “I know the picture you mean. It’s in the chapter on totem poles.”

  The two children stared at each other. Suddenly Amanda remembered. “The book said this was how the Totem Pole Indians looked long ago!”

  Neither Will nor Amanda spoke, but now they both knew what had happened.

  The black mirror in the museum had taken them into the past!

  Fox-of-the-Water pulled a large basket from behind the willow tree. “My mother told me to fill this with berries.”

  Will and Amanda went over to look at the basket.

  “Wow! Where are you going to find enough berries to fill anything this size?” Will wanted to know. “And how will you ever pick them all?”

  “We’d better get started. Where’s your berry patch?” Amanda asked.

  “Follow me.” The Indian boy tied the basket on his back. He started walking swiftly along the stony beach.

  Amanda and Will came after him. They were wearing sneakers, but they had a hard time keeping up with the barefoot Indian.

  The three children came to a big cedar log lying on the beach. Someone must have been cutting into it. Patches of the bark had been peeled off, and bits of wood were scattered around.

  Fox-of-the-Water took off the basket. He walked slowly around the log and picked up three short, wide pieces of wood. Then he sat down on a rock and used the bone knife hanging around his neck to split one end of each piece into five strips.

  “I thought you were in a hurry to get the berries picked, Fox-of-the-Water,” Will said. “Why are you wasting time whittling?”

  Fox-of-the-Water didn’t answer. Instead he went over to the fallen log and began to peel off a long piece of the soft inner bark.

  Amanda saw that he was making something. “Fox-of-the-Water,” she said, “what can I do to help?”