["Away they ran, howling and roaring"]
["Suddenly the great bear appeared, galloping heavily"]
FLYING PLOVER
I
THE MOUNTAINEER PEOPLE
Both of Flying Plover's parents had died when he was a little baby, and ever since—for six long years—he had lived with his grandmother. The old woman's name was Squat-by-the-fire. She was the wisest person in the tribe, in spite of the fact that an old man who lived in another village said that he knew twice as much as anybody else in the whole world. She was deep in medicine and history and story-telling. She could paint fine pictures on bark and cured skins, and was skilful in the carving of wonderful little figures in wood and bone and walrus ivory. She knew so much, and looked so wise, and had such bright eyes, that many of the tribesmen believed that she was a magician.
The tribe that Flying Plover and his grandmother belonged to lived far north, in that bleak and unexplored country called Labrador. They spent the summer months near the coast, where they fished in the great bays for cod and seals, and in the rivers for salmon and trout. They traded with the few white settlers and missionaries, and with the Eskimo people. At the approach of winter they traveled inland, with the great herds of caribou, into the sheltered valleys of the mountains. As the winter is a much longer season than the summer, in that country, these people spent the greater part of every year in the mountain forests—and so they are called the Mountaineer Indians, or the Mountaineers. But this book is not about the tribe, but is full of the stories that old Squat-by-the-fire told to little Flying Plover, in the long winter evenings.
You can not sit by the old woman's fire, and smell the herbs she was always steeping, and play with the little figures which she carved so cleverly, as Flying Plover could; yet I hope you will like her stories, for all that.