The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Síða 33

Vol. 58 #2
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
75
was here, in this room that Jessie One-hand
and Robert Peg-leg fought all night.”
“What did they fight about?” I asked.
“It was over nothing really” said
Madeleine Vanda,’’They were Metis, they
were cousins and good friends, well known
hunters, huge men and very strong. They
came here one night in the fall, after they
had been out hunting elk way up north in
the wilderness. They liked their liquour,
and started drinking as soon as they arrived
at the hotel. And because the liquor was
strong, and because they had downed it
rather quickly, it began to affect them.
They proceeded to argue over which was
bigger - the sun or the moon. Jesse said that
the moon was much bigger than the sun,
but Robert maintained the sun was much
smaller than the moon. Though they were
both of the same opinion even though they
were both wrong, they quarreled about this
with such vehemence that they came to
blows. They fought their way up the stairs
and into this room. The door slammed shut
behind them and it locked shut from the
outside. The cousins fought all night, and
the house shook from the fury until morn-
ing. No one wanted to go into the room
before morning, when the innkeeper
opened the door and looked in.
“And what did he see?” I asked.
“He saw two repentant sinners lying
on a pallet in the middle of the room, and
he found them reciting their prayers in the
Cree language.”
“And they have been disabled since
then?” asked O’Brian.
“Yes, just like before, neither more or
less” said Madeleine Vanda. “ There was a
slight change though, and it was this—now
Robert had one hand and Jesse now had a
wooden leg, whereas before it was Jesse
who had one hand and Robert had the
wooden leg.”
“How did this happen?” asked
O’Brian, and scratched his chin.
“It was all amazingly natural” said
Madeleine Vanda and smiled. “Because
when the cousins reconciled in the morn-
ing, they exchanged their names for the rest
of their lives —as is the custom in some
Indian tribes, when two men compete and
have been in deadly combat. But this event
is memorable especially for the reason that
the same night the cousins fought, another
small happening occurred that was consid-
ered quite extraordinary and long remem-
bered.”
“Oh, tell us about it” I said, burning
with curiousity.
“You have certainly heard tales of Big
Wolf the great Indian warrior” said
Madeleine Vanda. “He was chief of the
Assiniboine tribe and a good friend of the
Cree who lived on the plains to the west.
One summer, when he was about twenty
years old, he went south to Dakota to find
his cousin who was an Indian chief that
lived beside a river that flows in to the Red
River by Fort Pembina. They were Sioux
and closely related to the Assiniboines. The
Chief of the Dakotas had a daughter who
was extraordinarily beautiful, and her name
was Soley. She was the same age as Big
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