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It was already daylight, though the sun had not yet risen
above the tops of the forest-trees, which formed the visible
horizon; and from the aspect of the skies overhead, and the
soft, dewy coolness of the fragrant morning air, it promised to
be as beautiful a summer day as ever gladdened the face of
earth. There were but two, or three, small, fleecy specks of
cloud, suspended motionless near the zenith, visible in the
dark azure of the skies; and these were changing their hues
momently, as long lustrous rays came stealing up from the
eastward, harbingers of the sun's advent. A moment ago, they
were plain, sad-colored, gray patches on the blue ground-work;
gradually a dull purple glazed them over; that brightened into
rose-color; into rich carmine; and now they are glittering like
coals of fire, or flecks of molten gold, mirrored as clearly in
the still, narrow, brimful river, as they glow aloft in the summer
sky.

The thin, light mist, which crept up awhile since from the
surface of the translucent stream, has melted into air; and the

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evergreens on the farther shore, huge hemlocks and heavenreaching
pines, which grow down to the very water's edge, are
reflected so wondrously distinct, dark feathery plumage, arrowy
limbs, and white, weather-bleached centennial trunks,
that it were a very true eye which should define at once where
is the meeting of the reality and of the shadow. Ever and
anon a plump of duck and mallard come sweeping over head,
above the tops of the highest trees, the strident whistle of their
wings first attracting the eye to their quick, glancing flight,
and are scarce seen before they have darted out of sight beyond
the wooded point that bounds the next reach of the gentle
river. Once and again a heavy shadow flits over the smooth
expanse, the image as it seems of a gigantic pair of wings,
overshadowing half the width of the sunlighted channel. It
ceases suddenly, for the wings which projected it are folded,
and there on the naked crest of a huge cypress, poising himself
on the very pinnacle, sits the bald-headed eagle, watching
to see the parent duck lead forth her fledgling brood from the
cool covert of the sheltering lily-leaves, which overspread the
shoals, and give the wary water-birds a sure asylum. There
flits, along the pebbly margins, the noisy yellow-leg, the golden
plover, or the small-spotted sand-piper, each in pursuit of some
small worm or insect, its peculiar prey. There the harshscreaming
kingfisher circles above the small fry, as they dimple
the tranquil surface, hunting fry smaller yet, and yet more
powerless. There again, motionless as the gray trunk behind
him, which in hue he most resembles, patient and watchful,
stands the great blue heron; and now he cocks his bright eye,
and with an arrowy motion darts forward his long neck and
javelin bill, transfixing with a pitiless stroke the monster bullfrog,
chief basso of his aquatic orchestra, just as he has himself
sucked in a beautiful golden and blue tibellula, as he hung
poised with rapid wing over an open lotus flower. Here, in

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the shadow of the bank, where the water sleeps so clearly in
its brown, transparent reflections, mark, where, itself a shadow,
lies in expectant ambush the lithe body of the great northern
pickerel. There, he has struck at a passing shiner, and ere
the bright, silvery streak, that marked his rapid transit through
the water, has subsided, a heavier plunge is heard; for the
felon otter, watching from his hole under the tortuous alderroots,
has espied the motion, and pounced, tyrant-like, on the
spoiled and the spoiler simultaneously.

So it is ever, in the wilderness as in the world, the strong
prey still upon the weak, and the weak on the weaker. All
life is one long flight from those to be avoided, one long pursuit
of those to be made captive. From the man, half divine,
to the reptile, less than the brute, there is no rest, no respite—
to take or be taken, to slay or to be slaughtered, such seem
to be the conditions on which the boon of life is held; nor is
the crowded haunt, the boasted mart of civilized life in great
cities, in this respect endowed with one immunity beyond the
lonely forest, or the howling desert.

That is a wild and lonely spot even now, and few and rare
are the settlements around it, either of the white man or the
half-civilized Ojibwa or Pottawatomie, but at the time at which
I write, there was no spot more savage, nor farther removed,
as it would seem, from every human influence, than the wild
woods, the rocky shores, and the still waters, which surrounded
the embouchure of what is now known as the river Wye
into the eastern end of the great Georgian bay.

The eye of the white man, even now, as he paddles across
the inner cove into which the deep, clear, narrow river opens,
fails to detect the smallest opening in the dense tree-tops of the
forest through which the brimful river finds its outlet, nor does
the bosom of the bay itself indicate, in the least degree, that
large mass of extraneous waters which here should swell its

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volume, for it is shoal to the last degree, and overgrown with
a luxuriant vegetation of wild rice and reeds, through which
steal deviously a hundred tortuous and unsuspected channels,
through which only can the ponderous dug-out of the Canadian
Frenchman, or the light birch canoe of the native, find its
way into the entrance of the river.

The keener glance of an Indian, however apt to see things
with a sort of reasoning and inquiring gaze, deductive rather
than intuitive, would not be long in discovering that there ran
through those woods, seemingly so uninterrupted and unbroken,
a division line of some kind, regular though circuitous, nor in
suspecting that division line to be water; for whereas the
northern shore of the stream consists of low, damp, swampy
land, for a mile or two up the course of the river, covered with
a growth of tamarack, hemlock, and cedar, that to the south is
higher, bolder, drier, and is overspread by a finer forest of oak,
maple, birch, and poplar, with here and there the arrowy cone
of a gigantic white-pine, piercing the clouds a hundred feet
above the summits of its deciduous brethren.

To the ordinary eyes of the traveller or searcher of the picturesque,
signs like these have no meaning; but to the halfwild
forester or to the aboriginal man of the woods, they speak
volumes, and thence it is that to find any retreat so sure as to
baffle the instinct and blind the eyes of an Indian warrior on
the war-path, is one of the things — the few things on earth —
which may be set down, as the rule, to be impossible.

Nor had it escaped the penetration of the natives, that there
was more than ordinary facility in supporting their family relations
to be found in the neighborhood of the embouchure of
the beautiful Wye; for even at that early day, when the Iroquois
or Huron tribe were the sole possessors of the northern
shores of the great lakes, and when their villages and wigwams,
even upon their shores and water-courses, were few

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and far between, it would seem that they had established some
settlement in that vicinity, tempted, it may be, by the abundance
of fish which swam those limpid waters, and of fowl
which fed almost unmolested among the wild-rice lakes into
which its upward course expanded.

At the point of view whence we first looked on the tranquil
river, with its lazy eddies and many-colored, beautiful reflections,
the southern shore jutted forward in a wide, semi-circular
bend, above and below which the dense evergreens, which
were the only indications of the northern shore, seeming to
swim on the bosom of the slow-flowing stream, swept forward
in their turn for a hundred yards or so, when the southern
bank again advanced, and suffering a double reach to be seen,
resembling in shape an inverted letter S, cut off all farther
view in either direction so completely, that had it not been for
the quiet and sleepy swirls of the downward current, and the
narrowness and regularity of the channel as compared to its
width, the river might have been easily mistaken for an inland
pool or lakelet.

On both sides of the water many trees had fallen into the
stream, and lay some up, some down, some partially across
the current, and these of such giant bulk and colossal height,
that had two chanced to lie directly opposite, their branches
would have mingled, and they would actually have bridged the
stream; nay, they might well, as I have often seen in that region,
when backed by deposite after deposite of drift-wood, floating
trees, reeds, rice, and river trash, have formed a raft, and
becoming gradually covered with decomposed vegetable matter,
and overgrown with parasitic plants and shrubs, have assumed
the semblance of firm soil, with the slow waters soaking
constantly, although unseen, below them, on their way to
swell the everlasting chorus of Niagara, and sweep triumphant

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into the huge Atlantic, through that incomparable artery of
North America, the grand estuary of the St. Lawrence.

In this instance, however, perhaps by the constancy and
strength of the slow current, perhaps by human agency, for a
keen eye might detect the marks of the axe on some of the
massive bolls, the course of the river had been kept clear, and
though a canoe, either ascending or descending, must have
run a zigzag or circuitons course, in order to escape interruption
from the snags and sawyers, as they would be termed on
the southern waters, these in no case interlapped or lay within
forty or fifty feet distance of each other.

One of these trees, a vast white-oak, completely barked, and
bleached by the suns and snows, of fierce summers, burning
with almost tropic heat, and of winters, second to Zembla's or
Spitzbergen's only, had fallen from the extremity of the forward
bend of the southern shore, and lay somewhat down
stream, with its huge twisted roots standing erect and grisly, a
huge matted cheval-de-frize at the water's brink, and its great
gnarled and knotted branches partly imbedded in the mud,
partly overhanging the shallow which itself had created with
a canopy of moss and river-weeds, and all the trash accumulated
from a hundred floods and freshets.

Immediately below this, and so well concealed as to be invisible
to a casual observer, lay moored a birch-canoe of the
elegant form and delicate structure of the vessels of the aborigines,
and in it, busily employed even at that early hour in ensnaring
the finny denizens of the waters, sat a girl of some sixteen
or seventeen years, whom it required no second glance to
know for a child of the wilderness.

It is well known to those who have been in the habit of observing
the North American tribes in their natural state, removed
from the contamination to which they now seem almost
inevitably subject on the slightest contact with the whites, that,

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despite the detractions of color and of an uncouth and uncomely
costume, there is often, not only a rare beauty, but a rare
fascination about the younger Indian females, although it may
not at the same time be denied, that were a painter in search
of a model, wherefrom to design with the most vraisemblance
the likeness of his majesty of the infernal regions, he could not
do better than to select an old squaw, of it matters not what
tribe, and his type of the hideous, the repulsive, and the horrible,
must needs be perfect.

The girl in question was slender, delicate, and elastic as a
reed swaying in the currents of a gentle breeze, and what is
unusual among the aborigines, the females of whom are inclined
to be squat and dwarfish, was considerably above the
ordinary stature even of white girls, while all the outlines of
her graceful yet voluptuous figure, displayed a perfect unison
of all the lithe and fragile symmetry of girlish years with the
mature developments of perfect womanhood.

Her brow and face were dark, but not much darker than I
have seen in the liquid-eyed damas of Venice, or the stately
Spanish donnas, and the rich blood crimsoned her full, pouting
lips, and flushed, peach-like, through the golden hue of her
cheeks, with as warm a tide as ever burned in the impassioned
cheeks of an Anglo-Norman beauty.

Her long, straight hair, not curling in the least, nor waving,
nor yet in the slightest degree hard or wiry, fell down behind
her small ears, being braided in front in two broad bands over
the temples, and confined by a fillet or coronal of blue and
white wampum, stitched upon a thong of deer-skin, in loose,
heavy, soft, flowing masses, such as we see in some of the
portraits of Velasquez and other Spanish masters. It was of
the deepest and most perfect blackness, black as ebony or as
night, without the slightest indication of that purplish metallic
lustre which generally plays over what is not unfitly called

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raven hair in women of white blood, and more especially in
those of Irish race. Her eyes had the long, almond-shaped
orbits, and long-fringed lashes, which are deemed the rarest
charm of Italian beauty, and the large, soft pupils of the deepest,
clearest hazel, swam in a field of nacry bluish lustre,
which could be compared to nothing but the finest mother-ofpearl.

Her cheeks were flushed, at the moment when we look upon,
and her bright lips disparted with a gay smile, as she pulled in,
each after each, the glittering rock-bass, resplendent in their
golden armor, and watched these trophies of her prowess flapping
in the bottom of her canoe, till the gay sheen of their
scaly coats faded into the dull, blank hues of death. And as
those bright lips fell asunder in her mood of gentle merriment,
they displayed a set of teeth so brilliant, so delicately pure
and transparent in their undefiled enamel, that the most gorgeous
belle of courts and cities would have given the best
jewels she possessed in exchange for those gems of nature's
giving.

Her features, if they had not the regular and perfect symmetry,
the complete oval contour, and the short-arched,
wreathed upper lip of the Greek profile, nor yet the highborn,
glorious dignity of the superb Norman type, had yet a
harmony and unison entirely their own, a soft, tranquil, half-unconscious
majesty of stillness — something that leads you to
revert your thoughts to older worlds, or at least ages more remote,
when this earth was haply peopled by tribes less far removed
from the awful serenity of the immortals, such as sits to
this hour wonderfully enthroned on the calm brow and solemn,
tranquil beauty of the Egyptian sphynx.

Yet in this solemn fixedness of feature, this serene seriousness
of outline, there was nothing lewd or unwomanly; for in
so much as the outlines were statuesque and grave, the eyes

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wildly serious, was the expression at times arch and almost
jocund, and the smile of the wreathed and dimpled lips all that
could be desired of winning, feminine, and tender.

It is remarkable, too, that although habituated more or less,
as all Indian females must necessarily be, to labors of a harder
and more abject nature than are attributed even to the poorest
and rudest American females of the white race, her hands
were as delicate and small, with slight, round, tapering fingers,
and long, oval nails, as those of any princess of unmixed Norman
race. Her moccasined feet, too, were delicately and
proportionately small, not “cribbed, cabined, and confined” —
like those of many of our modern damsels, who, in this, appear
to imitate the high castes of the Chinese — till she could neither
stand nor go, but betokening at once delicacy of structure and
fitness for the purposes to which they were created by that
Providence which assuredly never made aught except unto its
end.

Her dress was peculiar, for it indicated that, even in that
remote angle of the northern wilderness, thousands of miles
aloof from the small and recent seaboard settlements of the
whites, white luxuries were attainable for the gratification of
female vanity. The tiara of wampum about her head was not
the shell-manufactured wampum of the natives, but of fine blue
and white Parisian bead-work. Her principal garment was a
short petticoat, or tunic, not unlike that of the huntress Diana,
leaving the right breast exposed, and barely reaching to the
knee, of bright azure broadcloth, with a shoulder belt, girdle,
and fringe of bead-work. Her lower limbs were protected by
leggings of dressed deer-skin, as finely wrought as the most
costly texture of the Flemish or English looms, and her feet
covered by moccasins, elaborately embroidered with dyed
horse-hair, which must evidently have been brought a long
distance from the eastward, since the gigantic animal which

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furnishes it so rarely found to the southwestward of the great
Canadian Ottawa, that it may be held to be unknown in those
regions.

Such was Ahsahgunushk Numamahtahseng, or the Reed-shaken-by-the-wind,
the fatal heroine of a disastrous legend;
the fairest daughter of Chingwauk, the White Pine, the great
chief of the Ojibwas, cast by singular fortunes, and strange
ends, into a region many hundred leagues to the northwest of
the hunting-grounds of her tribesmen.