Little Bee Lost
A day spent playing and exploring turned into a life-altering moment for a young Lakota boy.
Little Bee sat in the shade of a small, scrubby tree. He had been playing with his bow and arrow, but the late summer heat had tired him. He spied a grasshopper on the tree’s trunk and gently coaxed it into his cupped hands. He shivered when the strange, prickly feet touched his palm. He loved all things small and crawly.
He was approaching his fifth winter and knew that he would need to start learning about being a warrior. He wasn’t afraid, but he would miss the time he was able to spend studying beetles and ants and all the jumping, flying, scurrying things that the adults didn’t seem to notice.
He glanced over to where his mother and three aunties were picking chokecherries. He had gotten far away from them while he was playing, but he could still see them, and he could hear their voices as they sang, talked, and laughed. Reassured, he slowly opened his hands so he could look at the grasshopper.
He was so focused on his find that he didn’t notice the white people until they were coming very close to him. Little Bee gasped, and the grasshopper jumped away, disappearing into the tall grass.
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The Buffalo Hunt
It’s 1877, and 10-year-old Deer Foot is going on his first buffalo hunt with his father.
When Matthew He Bear was just a boy, his mother named him Deer Foot because he was a fast runner, and he ran whenever he could. But on a particular morning in early summer–the Moon of the June Berries–it was too early to run, so Deer Foot (who was 10 years old) lay looking up through the smoke hole in his family’s tipi. The sky slowly turned purple, and the stars began to fade, but he didn’t really notice. Today would be his first buffalo hunt, and it was all he could think about.