“waukewa and the struggling eagle were
floating outward and downward
through the cloud of mist”
A HURON CINDERELLA
BY HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY
Many years ago there was an Indian chief who had three daughters; and they lived in a lodge by the side of the Ottawa River—not in a wigwam, mind you, but a good old Huron lodge, like a tunnel, made of two rows of young trees bent into arches and tied together at the top, with walls of birch-bark. Oh! it was an honorable old lodge, with more cracks in the birch-bark than you could count, all patched and smeared with pitch.
The chief had three sons too, but they were killed in a great fight with the Iroquois. When the brave Hurons used up all their arrows they threw down their bows and rushed on the Iroquois with their tomahawks. They screamed and howled like eagles and wolves, and the Iroquois were so frightened that they wanted to run away, but their own magic-man threw a spell upon them, so that they couldn’t turn round or run, and they had to stand and fight. The Iroquois were cousins of the Hurons, and came of a brave stock; and as the Hurons were few compared to the Iroquois, few as the thumbs compared to the fingers, the Hurons were beaten, and only twenty men of the tribe escaped down the river, and none of the women except the chief’s three daughters.
Now the two eldest daughters were very proud, and loved to make a fine show before the young men of the tribe. One day a brave young man came to the lodge and asked the chief to give him a daughter for a wife.