Lessons+26+-+28

=Lesson 26 - __The Sign of the Beaver__= toc On the shelf ranged birch baskets filled with dried berries and the wild cranberries he had discovered shining like jewels along the boggy shores of the pond. They were puckery to the tongue, but when his mother came she would bring sugar, and the stewed cranberries would make a fine treat with her bread of white flour.

Matt forced himself to eat sparingly of these things. The corn he regarded as a sort of trust. His father had planted it, and would be counting on it to feed the family through the winter. And some must be saved for the spring planting. Proud though he was of harvest, Matt know in his head that it was far from enough. The hunt for food would be never-ending.

Hour after hour, with his bow, Matt trapped through the forest, the dog beside him. There was not much game to hunt these days. More other than not, his snares were empty. Soon the animals would be buried deep in burrows. Twice he had glimpsed a caribou moving through the trees, but he had little hope of bringing down any large animal with is light arrows. Once in a long while he succeeded in shooting a duck or a muskrat. The squirrels were too quick for him. Although the dog was certainly not much of a hunter, he did occasionally track down some small creature. But he also had to eat his share, sometimes more than his share, because Matt could not resist those beseeching eyes. Truth to tell, they were both hungry much of the time.

Luckily, they would not starve with the pond and creeks teeming with fish.Matt knew that for many months of the year fish filled the Indian cookpots. Luckily too, fish were was to catch, though Matt had to be conttuallytwisting and splicing new lines from vines and spruce roots. Mornings, now, he had to shatter a skin of ice on the pond. Soon he would have to cut holes with is axe and let his lines down deep. He shivered to think of it.

It was the cold that bothered him most. His homespun jacket was still sound, since he had little use for it in the warm weather. But his breeches were threadbare. One knee showed through a gaping hole, and the frayed legs stopped a good five inches above his ankles. His linen shirt was thin as a page of his father's Bible, and so small for him that it threatened to split every time he moved.Even inside the cabin he was scarcely warm enough. The moment he ventured outside his teeth chattered. He thought enviously of the Indian's deerskin leggings. But a deer was far beyond his prowess as a hunter.

beseeching envious prowess range snare sound sparingly teeming threadbare trust
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=Lesson 27 - __A Speech__=

I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. Too many misinterpretations have been made; too many misunderstandings have come up between the white men and the Indians. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them the same laws. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. All men were made by the same Great Spirit Chief. They are all brothers. The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it. You might as well expect all rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. If you tie a horse to a stake, do you expect he will grow fat? If you pen an Indian up on a small spot of earth and compel him to stay there, he will not be contented nor will he grow and prosper. I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.

I only ask of the Government to be treated as all other men are treated. If I cannot go to my own home, let me have a home in a country where my people will not die so fast. I would like to go to Bitter Root Valley. There my people would be happy; where they are now they are dying. Three have died since I left my camp to come to Washington.

When I think of our condition, my heart is heavy. I see men of my own race treated as outlaws and driven from country to country, or shot down like animals.

I know that my race must change. We cannot hold our own with the white men as we are. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. We ask that the same law shall work alike on all men. If an Indian breaks the law, punish him by the law. If a white man breaks the law, punish him also. Let me be a free man, free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to talk, think and act for myself -- and I will obey every law or submit to the penalty.

Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other then we shall have no more wars.

authority compel condition deny even misrepresentation pen penalty prosper submit
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Read the entire speech here!



=Lesson 28 - The Endless Steppe= We found a place to stand and, to my surprise, without feeling the least bit self-conscious. I immediately held up my mother's slip, the lacy pink silk blowing in the breeze. In a second, we were surrounded. Where were we from? Where did we live? What did Grandmother do? How old was I? they were exceedingly friendly and frankly inquisitive, these native Siberians. We answered the questions as fast as we could, with Grandmother doing most of the talking, since she knew Russian well and I hardly spoke it. We coaxed out potential customers to note the beauty of the lace, the fact that there were 16, //sixteen,// ribs in the umbrella. How much? Forty rubles. Forty rubles? There was a roar of laughter. All right, thirty-eight rubles. . . I caught Grandmother's eye, we smiled at each other; we were born traders and we were having a marvelous time. It was, in fact, the happiest time I had had in a a long, long time. The guns, the bombs of World War II were thousands of miles away and at the market place so was the labor camp close by. All around me children were giggling over nothing, girls were showing off their dolls - what if they were made of rags? - and boys were wrestling. These children were just like the children in Vilna. Hunger, fatigue, sorrow, and fright were forgotten: haggling was a wonderfully engrossing game. Rough hands that had scrounged in the earth for potatoes, and been frostbitten more than once, fingered the silk, sometimes as if it were a rosary, sometimes as if it were sinful for anything to be that silky, more often to test it for durability. If an egg was around fifteen rubles, how mush should a silk slip with //hand-drawn// lace be? Hand drawn, mule drawn, what difference if you couldn't eat it? We all joined in the laughter, I don't remember who bought Father's shirt and Grandmother's umbrella, but the slip was finally bought by a young women with lots of orange rouge on her cheeks. She was so plump I wondered how she was going to squeeze into it, but that I decided was for her worry, not mine.

Feeling very proud of ourselves with our newly acquired rubles, we now became the customers. What to buy? We went to the stalls where the milk, flour, white bread - a great luxury - and meat, back and forth from stall to stall, unable to make a decision.

acquired durability engrossing fatigue finger inquisitive luxury potential scrounge self-conscious
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=Unit Test Lessons 26 - 28=