The Mighty Hunter

I'm not really sure, but this book just feels racist to me. It was written in 1943, so it's definitely rather dated. It also kind of feels like a fable with the preachy tone.

There's a little Native American boy. His mom wants him to go to school so that he'll grow up to become a wise man and a good leader. But he also wants to be a hunter, like his dad, who didn't go to school. He thinks that hunting would be a lot more fun than going to school. So he skips school to go hunting, and finds a rat and is about to shoot it with his bow, but the rat speaks to him and says, "Oh, don't waste an arrow on me. Here's a prairie dog." And the prairie dog says, "Don't waste an arrow on me!" And it keeps getting bigger and bigger animals, until finally he's directed to a bear, and the bear says, "Why are you shooting me? Do you need my fur to keep warm? Are you hungry?" And he says, "No, I'm just hunting for fun!" And the bear says, "I only hunt when I'm hungry, and I'm hungry right now!" And the bear gets mad and chases the little boy, and the little boy runs. To school. The end.

I don't even know. I don't even know where this book is going. I think it's trying to say that school is important, kind of? But it's also just one of those stories where it keeps one-upping itself in a really annoying, repetitive way, and then at the end the boy is in over his head. If he had only shot the rat. But then again, all the animals are talking to him, so what kind of universe does this take place, where all the animals are clearly sentient, but that's not why he decides not to kill them? They're not saying, "Please don't shoot me, I can hold a conversation with you!" They're saying, "Don't shoot me, shoot this other guy instead," and then tricking him into going after a bigger thing. It's stupid. It's just annoying and dumb.