Book Review: The Sign of the Beaver

Title: The Sign of the Beaver

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Author: Elizabeth George Speare

Date: 1983

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin / Dell

ISBN: 0-440-47900-2

Length: 135 pages

Quote: “It was a good life, with only a few small annoyances…One of these was the thought of Indians. Not that he feared them.”

In the 1760s, twelve-year-old Matt and his family move to Maine. When the parents “have to” travel again, they leave Matt in charge of their little homestead. North America is still so unsettled that Matt spends his time shooing crows off the corn patch, snaring rabbits, and stuffing dry moss in his moccasins for warmth. He worries a little bit about Penobscot raiders and hopes a nice English neighbor family will be able to help him if he needs any adult help, at the beginning of the book. Then an English neighbor steals his gun and a kind Penobscot family show him some skills that help him survive.

This is an even nicer version of the European-immigrants-learn-Native-American-survival-skills story that Lois Lenski made out of the Molly Jemison story in Indian Captive. Matt is nobody’s slave. The Penobscot family who adopt him are so polite they even pretend that Matt’s going to teach their boy, Attean, to read English, although that project doesn’t go far and may be meant just to save Matt’s pride. When his parents stay away longer than anyone expected, Matt is offered the choice whether to move to Canada with his Penobscot family or stay in Maine and wait for his own family. Speare convinces us that all the adults involved think better of Matt for the decision he makes.

Twelve-year-olds don’t usually have much to tell us about their feelings during what are obviously emotional crises. They feel emotions, but not the same emotions adults do, nor do they have words to talk about them. In the best cases they stay busy. In this book Matt stays busy. We’re not told much about his emotions; we’re told a lot about how he cooks, hunts, fishes, mends his clothes, and expresses his longing for his mother by making new kitchenware as a gift for her.

Because European immigrants really did rely on survival skills they learned from Native Americans, it’s possible to suspend disbelief in this story while reading it. Only at the end did I find the predominant thought in my mind being, “They’re all utterly generic characters.” And maybe that’s as it should be. Speare didn’t need to give her five English and five Penobscot characters individual personalities. This is a teaching story, not a retelling of a factual story, so it may be proper that most of the characters don’t even have full names. Demographic descriptions are enough. Any English colonial boy might have shooed crows and snared rabbits like Matt. Any Penobscot grandmother might have told her family not to bring a White boy home, if they insisted on befriending one, and then decided there might be hope for a White boy who was thoughtful enough to rescue her grandson’s dog from a trap. These particular families weren’t real and we know nothing about the real individuals whose stories were in some ways similar to this story.

One thing I would have left out of this book is Matt’s criticism of the old Puritan primers that drew on the church catechism, teaching the alphabet with “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. Heaven to find, the Bible mind,” and so on. I don’t believe a real child of the 1760s would have dared to dismiss those primers or ideas with contempt, or even admit he didn’t understand them, although very likely he didn’t. In the 1760s children were taught the answers to the questions in the catechism. They learned them by rote; if they couldn’t repeat the right answers from memory they were scolded or spanked. If they didn’t understand the answers or the questions, they either kept quiet about it, or confessed their “unregenerate” condition to the church for prayer. Matt might have been clever enough to anticipate that “In Adam’s fall” wouldn’t mean anything to Attean, and he probably would have thought a novel like Robinson Crusoe was more fun, but at this period of history religious indoctrination was inescapable. A mature man might have admitted to a skeptical thought, if he was looking for trouble. I’d like to see evidence that a twelve-year-old ever did.

Speare’s young-adult story, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, was more deftly spun around the history of a colony that has more history, and won awards. The Sign of the Beaver seems to have taken less thought and research, but of Speare’s other fiction this is the book that everyone agrees deserves to be reprinted along with The Witch of Blackbird Pond.