Last summer, near where we were camped, a very old squaw took her granddaughter, aged ten, to look over her nets. The child was in the bow of the canoe. Suddenly they came across a big bull moose swimming the river. They had no rifle and there was no time to return to camp to fetch one. The old woman did not hesitate. With one sweep of her paddle she steered the small canoe straight for the moose, while she screamed to the little girl to pick up the small axe which they were using to drive in the stakes of their nets.
The child was frightened but she answered the call of the blood. She seized the axe and, when her grandmother fearlessly paddled the canoe alongside the huge horns of the moose, she struck with all her might. She was too young to know how to use her small weapon. Instead of aiming between the animal’s ears with the head of the axe, she struck blindly with the blade. She missed several times, wounding the big moose in the neck.
The infuriated animal roared, shook his head, lunged out with his front paws, narrowly missing the canoe. The little girl kept on savagely. Finally, she buried her axe in the bull’s huge back. She did not have the strength to wrench it out. The moose reached the shore, staggered up the bank and disappeared in the bush.... We found it an hour later, dead, a few hundred yards away.
There was a silent but proud little Indian girl in camp that night.
The bull moose must have weighed over twelve hundred pounds, while the axe measured exactly three feet long.
Tale XXVI: Outlawed in the Barren Lands
The barren lands ... far away, north of the trees. Wind-swept, rock strewn, colorless. An undulating desert with huge boulders, grey moss, little patches of scrub willows nestling in the hollows of the hills. Thousands of small streams and lakes.
Far away on the edge of the Arctic. Bleaker than the northern moors of Scotland shorn of their native heather. The feeding ground of the wandering herds of caribou. The nestling place of all water fowl.
Far away, skirting the frozen seas. A land of waste lying on the top of the world. Scarred and twisted by some gigantic earthquake hundreds of centuries ago. Blasted eternally by the icy breath of the pole.