The Sign of the Beaver

Summary

The Sign of the Beaver takes place in the Maine woods in 1768. Matt Hallowell, twelve years old and about to turn thirteen, has helped his father clear land and build a log cabin on a new claim. In midsummer his father walks back to Quincy, Massachusetts, to fetch Matt's mother, his sister Sarah, and a baby expected soon, leaving Matt to guard the cabin and tend the corn. He leaves Matt his rifle and the watch that had belonged to Matt's grandfather, and expects to return in six or seven weeks. Matt's troubles begin almost at once. A rough drifter named Ben shares his supper, tells tales of fighting the Indians, and slips away in the night with Matt's rifle. A bear breaks into the cabin and ruins the stores of flour and molasses. Trying to rob a bee tree for honey, Matt is stung by a swarm and flees into a pond, where an old Native man, Saknis, pulls him out and treats his swollen stings. Saknis proposes a bargain: his grandson Attean will bring Matt game, and in return Matt will teach Attean to read the white man's marks, so that the beaver people will not be tricked out of their hunting grounds by treaties they cannot read. The lessons go badly at first: when Matt reads aloud from Robinson Crusoe, the proud Attean has no patience for a story in which a native man kneels as servant to a white one. Slowly the teaching turns around. Attean shows Matt how to make a fishhook and snares, how to find his way by blazes and the marks that show which clan may hunt a stretch of forest, and why a beaver-clan hunter must not take an animal from a turtle-clan trap. When a mother bear charges, the boys face her together and kill her. Saknis invites Matt to a feast in the village, where he meets Attean's grandmother, who hates white men, and his sister Marie. Matt learns that Attean's mother was killed by white bounty hunters and his father went after them and never returned. The grandmother's coldness thaws after Matt helps free Attean's dog from a steel trap. Attean goes into the forest alone to seek his manitou and comes back a man, with a rifle of his own. As autumn comes, the beaver people prepare to move west, away from the spreading settlements, and Saknis invites Matt to come with them as Attean's brother. Matt declines because his family may still come. At parting Attean leaves Matt his dog, Matt gives Attean his grandfather's watch, and Attean calls him brother. Alone through the first snows, Matt lives by what he was taught. In December his family finally arrives by sled: they had all been sick with typhus, and the new baby had died. His father tells Matt he has done a grown man's job. Houghton Mifflin published the novel in 1983; it won a 1984 Newbery Honor.

Top Lessons

• A teacher who becomes a student

  Matt agrees to teach Attean to read and assumes that makes him the one who knows things. In the woods, Attean knows far more, and Matt survives only because he learns to listen. The novel shows that real friendship begins when each person is willing to be taught by the other.

• Keeping a promise to wait

  Matt's father told him to stay with the cabin, and Matt does, even when the weeks stretch into months and Saknis offers him a home with the beaver people. His faithfulness to his family's plan, through fear and loneliness, is the backbone of the story.

• Seeing a story from the other side

  When Matt reads Robinson Crusoe aloud, Attean refuses to admire the hero and is angry at how Friday is treated. Matt begins to understand that the same events can look very different to someone from another people, and his respect for Attean grows from that discovery.

• Growing up is earned

  Attean becomes a man by going alone into the forest to seek his manitou; Matt becomes one by keeping the cabin through a winter alone. Each boy grows up through a trial suited to his own people, and each honors the other's.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Medicine in the novel is the medicine of the frontier, where help is far away and families care for their own. Matt's bee stings, which swell his face and body, are treated by Saknis with forest remedies rather than by any physician. The family's long delay is caused by typhus, the louse-borne fever that ran through crowded eighteenth-century households and ships, and the new baby's death in infancy reflects the high infant mortality of the period; Speare reports both quietly through Matt's mother at the reunion. Attean's grandmother's lasting hostility after her daughter's murder is shown as grief and anger rather than illness. Matt's worry about food through the coming winter, and the smoking, drying and storing he learns from Attean, give the book its concern with nutrition and survival.

• Chapter 5

  Matt is stung by a swarm at the bee tree, plunges into the pond, and wakes in his cabin with Saknis and Attean tending his swollen stings.

• Chapter 17

  Attean tells Matt how his mother was killed and his father went after the killers and did not return; his grandmother's bitterness is explained.

• Chapters 23-24

  Matt lays in meat, fish and firewood, and makes mittens and a cap from skins, to last a winter alone.

• Chapter 25

  The family arrives and explains the delay: all were sick with typhus, and the baby born in Massachusetts has died.