THE PIPE OF PEACE

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 13, 6 April 1927, Page 5

THE PIPE OF PEACE

THERE’S a tang of winter in the air to-night, a moist, earthy scent and the ground is spongy underfoot and satiated with rain. And a constant drip, drip, spatter-spat, like an eerie tattoo, sounds on the walls of the Wigwam. The four-footed creatures have sought their lairs and never a trapper is abroad; the Lake of Many Waters sleeps in the shadows, a network of invisible ripples mingled with the flotsam of fallen twigs and leaves. But here is warmth and light and a sense of peace and well-being where Redfeather holds council with his Chiefs and Braves who know the value of friendship that speak with the voice of the heart. Let us pay our homage to the Pipe of Peace that the ways of goodfellowship may lift the grey curtain from a series of sunless days. Somewhere I have read that “days pass when we see no beautiful sight, hear no sweet sound, smell no memorable odour, when we exchange no word of deeper understanding with a friend.” To Redfeather these seem the grey days, the cheerless days, the meaningless days even though the skies may be empty of cloud and a benign sun shining. There is an old philosophy that man may rule his days according to his own will, or, in a word, carry his sunshine about with him. In the calendar of dates some days stand out and demand to be remembered, days tilled with happenings that single them out from their fellows, while the other days glide uneventfully into weeks and are swallowed up in the blur of forgetfulness. A wet day is a wet blanket to tjiose who would be up and doing. It acts as a damper on activity and yet it may be worthy of a place in the register of unforgotten things if it has won for us a friend or given us any event or achievement worth remembering. And so in a measure we carry our good days about with us as an armour against the future, even when they have been torn from the calendar and gathered into the lap of yesteryear. —REDFEATHER