The Heart of the Red Firs: A Story of the Pacific NorthwestAnderson, Ada Woodruff
General
The Heart of the Red Firs: A Story of the Pacific Northwest
Anderson, Ada Woodruff
Northwest, Pacific -- Fiction
It was one of those intervals when the boy, having incensed his father,
sought refuge with his mother’s people while Laramie’s wrath cooled. At
such times the Indian in Mose effaced the white. He bound his head in a
crimson handkerchief, and wrapped himself in a blanket, which
Clak-la-sum-kah had adorned with many buttons for her grandson’s use.
He looked a true Klickitat, straight as a young hemlock, lithe as a
nearly grown cougar in the woods. His face was a bronze oval, sharply
chiseled, and he had the eyes of a hawk. He recalled to the old chief
his own youth, when, having a different and much hyphened name, he had
been a leader among the young braves of the powerful Yakima nation
beyond the Cascades; when, hunting the buffalo, he had crossed the
Rockies and skirmished with the Blackfeet, or, exacting tribute from
weaker neighbors, had driven home numberless horses to pasture on the
vast Palouse plains. He found in the boy an appreciative and tireless
listener when he recounted these past glories, and he painted them
brilliantly, in sharp contrast to the colorless present. Mose had no
brave companions, no followers in the hunt, no tribe.
And the whites were responsible for this; they only were to blame. Not
the Hudson Bay men, who, trading for furs, brought guns and many useful
things to the Indians, but the "Bostons," who came at the first to rob
them of their country. From the beginning the Yakimas had understood
and opposed them, and, when at last a thousand warriors had crossed the
Cascades to fall on the white settlements of the salt water, Yelm Jim
had been among them. They had met defeat, and he, himself, had spent
breaking years in the strong house of the "Bostons," and at the end of
his captivity he had found himself poor and forgotten and another tyee
raised in his place. For this reason the old chief had not returned to
his people, but had buried himself in the forest.
But already the white settlers pressed hard on his retreat; axes, the
rasp of saws, their shrill voices scattered the deer. He must go
farther and farther in search of grouse that once had nested almost at
his door; and now, since Slocum had robbed Mose of the musket, the old
chief must set laboriously to work and shape the miserable arrow points
of agate.
When Yelm Jim thought of this final outrage he drew yet more fiercely at
his pipe, and in the shadow of his ragged hatbrim his brows beetled and
gloomed. It was not the right moment for young Kingsley to darken the
doorway.
One of Laramie’s hounds, which had again tracked Mose, sprang up
growling, but at a word from the boy settled back whimpering, with his
nose between his paws. His mate, snuffing suspiciously, moved to the
intruder’s feet.
His familiar "Clahowya," said in a big, frank voice, startled the lodge
and the first dog belled a note.
"Clahowya," he repeated. "Hello."
Still no answer except a longer note from the hound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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