“But I was confused. Later I asked the boy who intervened what it meant to ‘bury the hatchet.’ He told me it meant to end an argument. But what was a hatchet? I asked. A small axe, he said. It was a tradition among some of the Indigenous people to bury a weapon as a way of ending disputes. The North Americans stole this phrase from them, like everything else, and ‘to bury the hatchet’ became an idiom for ending a disagreement. “‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘No one forgets where the axe is buried. It will always be there to dig up again.’
