Timid Hare

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Timid Hare

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Timid Hare, by Mary Hazelton Wade,
Illustrated by Louis Betts
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Title: Timid Hare
Author: Mary Hazelton Wade
Release Date: January 24, 2005 [eBook #14784]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TIMID
HARE ***
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TIMID HARE
The Little Captive
by
MARY H. WADE
Author of "Little Cousin Series", etc.
Illustrated by Louis Betts
Whitman Publishing Co. Racine -- Chicago
1916

[Illustration: Cover Art]
[Frontispiece: Buffalo Rib was a Handsome Youth.]

CONTENTS
CAPTURED BEFORE THE CHIEF THE NEW HOME HARD
WORK THE CHANGE THE VISIT THE MISCHIEF MAKER THE
HAPPY DAY THE DOG FEAST THE FESTIVAL MOVING DAY
THE JOURNEY THE MEDICINE MAN THE WINTER HUNT

List of Color Plates

Buffalo Rib Was a Handsome Youth
The Stone and Her Son Black Bull Were Hurrying Home
"Sweet Grass, Listen to Me" [Missing from book]
"I Soon Had a Fire Started"
Black Bull Was Helpless
Bent Horn's Mind Was Made Up
They Looked With Wonder at the Medicine Man
"Help Me, Great Spirit" [Missing from book]

CAPTURED
Swift Fawn sat motionless on the river-bank.
"Lap, lap," sang the tiny waves as they struck the shore. "Lap, lap,"
they kept repeating, but the little girl did not heed the soft music. Her
mind was too busy with the story White Mink had told her that
morning.
After the men had started off on a buffalo hunt Swift Fawn had left the
other children to their games in the village and stolen away to the
favorite bathing place of the women-folk.
"No one will disturb me there," she had said to herself, "and I want to
be all by myself to think it over."
After she had been there for sometime. Swift Fawn drew out from the
folds of her deerskin jacket a baby's sock, and turned it over and over in
her hands curiously. Never had she seen the like of it before. How
pretty it was! Who could have had the skill to weave the threads of
scarlet silk in and out of the soft wool in such a dainty pattern? Was

it--the child whispered the word--could it have been her mother?
White Mink had always been so good to her, Surely no real mother
could have been more loving than the Indian woman who had watched
over her and tended her, and taught her from the time when Three
Bears had brought her, a year-old baby, to his wife. Where he found the
little one, he had never told.
And so she was a white child. How strange it was! Yet she had grown
up into a big girl, loving the ways of the red people more and more
deeply for eight happy years.
"Surely," thought the child, "I could not have loved my own parents
more than I do White Mink and Three Bears."
"I wish--oh, so hard!" she added with a lump in her throat, "that White
Mink had not told me. I don't want to remember there ever
was--something different."
With these last words Swift Fawn lifted the little sock and was about to
hurl it into the water, when she suddenly stopped as she remembered
White Mink's last words.
"I give this shoe into your keeping," the woman had said solemnly. "I
have spoken because of my dream last night, and because of its
warning I bid you keep the shoe always."
With a little sigh, Swift Fawn drew back from the edge of the stream
and replaced the shoe in the bosom of her jacket. Then she stretched
herself out on the grassy bank and lay looking up into the blue sky
overhead. How beautiful it was! How gracefully the clouds floated by!
One took on the shape of a buffalo with big horns and head bent down
as if to charge. But it was so far away and dreamlike it was not fearful
to the child. And now it changed; the horns disappeared; the body
became smaller, and folded wings appeared at the sides; it was now, in
Swift Fawn's thoughts, a graceful swan sailing, onward, onward, in the
sky-world overhead.

The little girl's eyes winked and blinked and at last closed tightly. She
had left the prairie behind her and entered the