Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned
1903
Two Little Savages: Being the Adventures of Two Boys Who Lived as Indians and What They Learned
1903
Two twelve-year-old boys abandon theircivilized clothes for paint and feathers, determined to live as Indians in the woods outside their small town. Yan, a rebellious nature lover with a strict father, and his companion embark on a summer of astonishing self-education: they learn to track deer by their footprints, identify birds by their calls, build shelters that shed rain, and read the forest like a language. Ernest Thompson Seton, who would cofounder the Boy Scouts with Robert Baden-Powell, filled this 1903 classic with practical instructions that generations of young readers have used as a blueprint for their own wilderness adventures. The boys steal away at dawn, study the habits of foxes and hawks, and discover that the world outside their window is far more alive than any classroom. This is a book that taught millions of children to look down at the ground and see stories in mud, to look up at trees and see architecture. It endures not because its vision of Native American life is historically accurate, but because it captured something true about childhood's hunger for freedom and the natural world's capacity to answer that hunger.
