Long ago in Indian days in Canada, when Rabbit worked for Glooskap as
his forest guide, he was a great thief. He liked most of all to steal
by moonlight, and he crept quietly into gardens and fields where
Indian vegetables were growing, for he was very fond of cabbage and
lettuce and beans. Not far from his home there lived alone an old
widow woman who had no children. She could not hunt game because she
was a woman, and she had never been trained to the chase, so she kept
a little garden from which she made a good living. All day long from
dawn until sunset she toiled hard, tilling her little garden, watering
her vegetables and keeping them free from weeds. And she grew green
cabbages and red carrots and yellow beans and big fat pumpkins and
Indian corn, which she traded with Indian hunters in return for fish
and meat. In this way she always had plenty of food, and she lived
very well on good fare. But Rabbit, going his rounds one day,
discovered her garden, although it was deep in the forest, and every
night by moonlight or starlight he robbed it, and grew sleek and fat
from the results of his thefts. And morning after morning the old
widow woman found that many cabbages and carrots were missing and that
much harm had been done to her plants. She had an idea that Rabbit was
the pilferer, for she had heard that he was a great thief, but she was
not very sure. She watched many nights, but she was never able to
catch the robber, so stealthily did he come, and it was not easy to
see him in the shadows. So she said to herself, "I will set up a
scarecrow, a figure in the shape of a little man, and I will place it
at my garden gate, and it will frighten away the robber, whoever he
may be, for I must save my vegetables or I shall starve when the cold
winter comes."
She picked from the spruce and the fir trees close by a great store of
gum and balsam. This she formed into a figure in the shape of a little
man. She made two eyes from glass beads that would shine like fire in
the starlight, and a nose from a pine cone, and hair from the corn
tassels and yellow moss. Then she placed the figure at the entrance to
the garden where she knew the robber would come. "Now," she thought,
"I will scare away the thief."