A few years ago a band of Sioux Indians came to Milwaukee with a circus. A twelve-year-old boy found his way to the circus grounds to see the Indians with their buckskin leggings, their war bonnets of eagle feathers, and their painted faces. The boy hung around their tepees all day trying to talk to them, but they completely ignored him. 'If there was only some way, I could figure out how to get them interested in me, if I could only think of something they want, maybe I could get them to talk to me,' the boy thought.

Then he remembered how thick the wild rabbits were in back of the park. He hinted to the Indians that they might like some wild meat for a change. It wasn't very long until this boy was stalking cottontails with the Indians. After the hunt, the Indians took Ben back to their encampment and allowed him to go into their tepees with them. They skinned the rabbits and threw them in cooking pots for their dinner.

Sometimes it’s hard for us to get to know someone new. There will be sometimes in our lives that we will be the one reaching out to make a new friend. And, there will be times that we will need to be the one who needs to be open to someone who is reaching out in order to know us more.

Back to our young man Ben,

Do you know who he was? He’s W. Ben Hunt. The Boy’s Life artist and the writer of over 1,000 articles on Indian lore and handicraft.