Lightfoot was an Indian boy growing up at the time of the great League of the Iroquois. When he was a baby he slept in a cradle board. "'I'll hang him up there in the tree,' his mother said, 'and the wind will swing his cradle. And he will hear the robins and the song sparrows around him. Maybe they will teach him how to talk.'"

Later Lightfoot learned to walk like a hunter, to sit quietly guarding the cornfield, to collect maple syrup, to canoe alone up river and set his own fish traps.

It seemed too long to wait for the day when he would be big enough for manly things—hunting, lacrosse, his own special totem— but the day finally came.

Woven into the story are the legends and history of the Iroquois themselves, an integral part of Lightfoot's education. Miss Shippen's writing has simplicity and rhythm and a fitting dignity. The drawings of the Indian symbols, of Lightfoot and life in the Bear Clan, are by Tom Two-Arrows, an Iroquois of today, who is thoroughly familiar with his people's past.

From the dust jacket