Little+White+Riding+Hood+by+Barbara+G.+Walker

Once upon a time there was a little girl called White Riding Hood because she always wore a snow white hood when she went out riding or walking. She lived with her mother, Red riding Hood, in a cottage on the edge of the great forest. White Riding hood’s grandmother (who always wore black) lived in another cottage deep within the forest, a long way from inhabited and cultivated lands. Nevertheless, people often travelled the winding forest road to visit White Riding Hood’s grandmother, because she was known far and wide as a powerful witch who could cure diseases, set broken bones, deliver babies, give sound advice, and create charms for love, good luck, abundant crops, and clement weather. She could communicate with spirits of trees and wild animals. Her cottage was surrounded by pens where she kept an ever-changing assortment of convalescent forest creatures whose injuries she healed. One day White Riding Hood’s mother made up a basket of staples- salt, flour, honey, cheese, dried lentils, and other foodstuffs- for White Riding Hood to carry to her grandmother. She could stay for several days, bringing the basket back later with several herbs and roots that the grandmother gathered. White Riding Hood was happy to obey, because she loved visiting her grandmother. The forest cottage offered birds and animals to observe and play with, and it smelled richly of herbal concoctions that her grandmother brewed. There was always something interesting going on there. White Riding Hood’s grandmother had taught her many things about plants, stones, stars, winds and waters. She also her granddaughter to respect the wild creatures. She was especially fond of the shy forest wolves, whose habits she had studied by long and patient observation. She insisted that wolves were not ferocious vermin that some people claimed they were, but highly intelligent, loyal, noble-hearted dogs, gentle with their own kind and even humans who didn’t threaten them. The grandmother had cured several wolves of sickness and healed injuries inflicted on them by hunters or by trappers who set vicious leg-hold traps. She had learned how to behave nonthreateningly in the presence of the wolf pack, so she would not be attacked. She taught White Riding Hood the proper attitudes that the wolves could recognize, and made her recognize that if she behaved appropriately, she had nothing to fear. [FILL IN SECTION] She was too angry to feel afraid, even though she knew her position was dangerous and if the men chose to fight her, she would inevitably lose. The weak-minded one giggled again at her words. “Go on, grab her, Will,” he snuffed. “Don’t you touch me, or I’ll tell my grandmother on you,” WRH threatened. “She’s the witch of the Great Forest, and she’ll put a spell on you to make your feet turn backwards and your ears fall off. You’ll be sorry.” “I’ve heard about her,” Will sneered. “She’s a devil who can turn herself into a wolf. If that’s your grandmother, you’ve got evil blood in you, girl.” “Go on, will, grab her, grab her,” the younger one said again. Will hesitated, then turned away with a contemptuous gesture. “She’s not worth a scuffle,” he blustered. “And we’ve got to get to the rest of the trapline. Forget it, Rollo.” “Aw, come on, come on, Will,” Rollo whined. “She’s old enough, isn’t she? Come on, let’s do it to her.” “I said no Rollo,” the older hunter snapped, and his companion cowered. They turned and marched away, leaving White Riding Hood to her own devices. She dropped her stick, picked up her basket, and ran to get away from the hunters as fast as possible. When she arrived at her G’s cottage, she told her G about the two hunters. “I know that pair,” the G said. “They’re as mean as can be. I know how we can foil them, but it will have to wait for tomorrow. Right now, we should go out and see if we can find those orphan cubs before it’s too late.” So White Riding Hood and her Grandmother went out to check the various wolf dens the Grandmother knew. Sure enough, in the third one they found four very hungry infant pups crying for their mother. White Riding Hood wrapped two in her cloak, and her Grandmother took the other two. They carried the pups back to the cottage. The Grandmother showed White Riding Hood how to feed them with warm goat’s milk from small bottles with leather nipples. They seemed to digest it well enough, and soon they were sleeping contently in a straw-lined box near the hearth. White Riding Hood was so enchanted with the baby wolves that she didn’t get around to looking at the other animals until the next morning. This time her Grandmother had a fawn with a fractured leg, a hawk with a broken wing, and a raccoon who’d had three toes pulled off by a trap and was recovering from an acute infection. After tending to these creatures, the grandmother took tools and set off with White Riding Hood to visit the hunters; traplines. She carefully sprang each trap and then broke it, throwing away springs and leaving behind only scattered pieces of metal. One trap she left intact and carried home. She concealed it and set it at her front doorstep, saying to White Riding Hood, “Now we’ll see what we catch. I know those fellows will be coming by here when they find out what happened to their traps.” Her prediction came true early the next morning, when Will and Rollo showed up, enraged, at her gate. “Come on out of there, old witch,” Will roared. “I know it was you who broke our traps. Come on out and take what’s coming to you.” “Come and get me if you dare,” the grandmother called. She wrapped herself in a bed sheet and put over her head a grotesque mask carved and painted to look like a huge wolf with bared teeth. It had long, purplish-red tongue that she could push in and out between bug teeth by using her own tongue. Holding his gun in readiness to shoot, Will charged up to the door with Rollo following. He raised his foot to kick the door open, but at the same time his supporting foot was seized by the trap that sprang up from under the carpet of leaves. He fell heavily on his side. The gun went off, blowing some twigs off a maple tree, and flew out of his hands. The grandmother threw the door open and appeared in her wolf mask, a hatchet in her hand. Yanking fruitlessly at the trap, Will began to scream. Rollo stuttered, “Wh-what b-big teeth you have, Grandma!” “The better to eat you with!” the grandmother shouted, and neatly split Will’s skull with her hatchet. Rollo turned and ran as if all the devils in hell were after him. He was never seen in the forest again. Later the grandmother chopped up the hunter’s body into manageable pieces and strewed them in the forest for the wolves to eat. Little White Riding Hood went home the next day. When her mother asked what she had done at Grandmother’s house, she said, “Well, we helped feed some wolves.”