“You see it’s just a modified tomahawk,” he said, “with long blade and thin head, and only a little toy axe, to look at. But it has cut down many good-sized trees when I needed them, all the same. And the axe you were using this afternoon, as you probably noticed, is simply a bigger brother of this little fellow, exactly the same shape. It’s the kind the trappers use in the far North, because it will do all the work of a four-pound axe, and is only half as heavy. We’ve got some of those big axes over there under the tarpaulin, but we’ll leave them behind when we hit the trail, and take that small one with us.”
While they were talking Martin had been getting out a parcel containing clothing and odds and ends, and now he sat down before the fire to “do some work” as he expressed it.
“If you’re not too sleepy to listen,” he said, “I’ll tell you a story that I know about a little Algonquin Indian boy.”
Larry was never too tired to listen to Martin’s stories; and so he curled up on a blanket before the fire, while the old man worked and talked.
CHAPTER V
THE STORY OF WEEWAH THE HUNTER
It had been a hard day’s work for both of them, and strange as everything was to Larry, and awful as the black woods seemed as he peeped out beyond the light of the fire, he had a strange feeling of security and contentment. It might be that there were terribly hard days of toil and danger and privations ahead, but he was too cozily situated now to let that worry him.
Besides he was feeling the satisfaction that every boy feels in the knowledge that he has done something well. And even the exacting old Martin, always slow to praise or even commend, had told him over his cup of tea and his soup at supper, that he “would make a hunter of him some day.” And what higher praise could a boy hope for?
“Nobody knows just how old Weewah was when he became a mighty hunter,” Martin began presently, without looking up from his sewing, “because Indians don’t keep track of those things as we white folks do. But he couldn’t have been any older than you are, perhaps not quite so old.
“He was old enough to know how to handle his bow and arrows, though, to draw a strong enough bow to shoot an arrow clean through a woodchuck or a muskrat, or even a beaver, although he had never found the chance to try at the beaver. He carried his own tomahawk, too—a new one that the factor at Hudson Bay Post had given him,—and was eager to show his prowess with it on larger game.
“But the hunting was done by the grown up men of the village, who thought Weewah too small to hunt anything larger than rabbits. Yet there were other boys of his own age who found more favor in the hunters’ eyes because they were larger than he. ‘Some day you will be a hunter,’ they told him, ‘but now you are too small.’