| And he lived there with them. It seems to me he must have felt very lost... Most of the time, the Indians were good to him. They taught him how to hunt. They would put paint on him, and put beads in his hair... the way they used to live back then. They lived in the woods. Now of course, when the Indians had a feast, they would drink some eau de vie — that’s what they called it, I suppose it was like moonshine... Sometimes they would take things out on the little boy. One time, they even wanted to scalp him — maybe more than once, I don’t know. But the Indian mothers, they really liked the little boy, he was lovable, and they would get a bottle and show it to the men. And that would distract them and the little boy would run away. By the time he would come back, everything would have blown over, and he was all right. |
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| But then in those days, the Indians would comme to Petite Côte, they’d come in wagons, big wagons, and they had things they would trade with the folks there - the folks at Petite Côte. I guess maybe it was furs, things like that. And they would trade them for bags of sugar, or flour. And they always brought this little boy with them. And among the people there, there were some women who would say : |
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“You know, that child with them, he’s not one of them. He doesn’t
look like an Indian. He has chestnut brown hair and...” well I suppose he
wasn’t decked out very well, his hair was all matted, but he had blue eyes
and a fair face. And they were very interested, so they said: “I have a notion to try and exchange something or other for that boy.” And sure enough, it worked. I think maybe they got him for a bag of sugar or something like that — they traded for him, at any rate. |
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And the first thing he did, he
went and sat down next to the river — it might have been the Detroit River — and
he took all the little beads out of his hair, and the little gold rings, and he
chucked them all into the water. Then he grew up. He wasn’t with his family, but he had a horse. He became a teenager, and then older than that. One fine day, he said: “I want to go find my parents.” So he left, on his horse, through the woods, and he travelled about and he asked a lot of questions. Anyway, he got to the point where he was pretty sure he had found his house, the house where he was born. And he went and knocked on the door. And that very day, there was a big wedding going on there — those people were getting ready for a wedding — the table was set, all the neighbours and relatives were there to celebrate. And now, here’s this wanderer asking for something to eat. But he was a fairly good-looking young man, so they let him in. But they didn’t let him eat at the wedding table — they set a side table for him. And the mother, she was seeing to everything, and she went to the kitchen and she said to someone: “My gosh, if Tommy was still alive (meaning her husband), I’d say that was him!” And well that got people talking and... little by little, it came out that it was her son. It was the little boy who had grown to be a man, and he had found his way home. And as a matter of fact, the wedding they were celebrating there, it was the wedding of the girl who was born the night his father was murdered. 
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