[figure description] Page 014.[end figure description]

Upon examining the features of the Indian, which
were of a singularly brutal cast, Greyslaer felt convinced
that he had beheld them before, but where
or when it was impossible for him to say.

Bending near to scrutinize them more closely,
he observed that life still remained; for the eyes,
which were shut, had their lids, not smoothly drooping
as when closed in death, but knit and screwed
together as when suddenly closed in a paroxysm of
rage or pain. They opened now, as a heavy gasp
broke from the bosom of the savage. Max instantly
possessed himself of the scalping-knife which lay
near, and held it, like a dagger of misericorde, at
the throat of his reviving foe. The slightest thrust
would have rid him at once of all farther difficulty;
but it was not in his heart to slaughter a living man
thus laid at his mercy, and he shouted to the girl
to bring him a withe that he might bind his prisoner.
The Dew replied not to his call. But he heard

[figure description] Page 015.[end figure description]

a quick trampling near, which he mistook for her
approach.

He looked in the direction whence the sound of
footsteps came, but the leafy covert was so thick in
that direction that he could descry nothing. He listened
anxiously; they came nearer, but there was
no reply to his repeated calls. The footsteps paused
a moment. He leaned forward to peer beneath
the heavy branches; and in the same moment that
an armed Indian darted from the covert before him,
the shadow of another, who was approaching from
behind, was cast athwart him. He had not time to
spring to his feet before he was again a captive and
defenceless.

The two last-comers were soon joined by others,
who quickly made a rude litter of boughs for their
wounded tribesman, and the whole party then took
their way through the woods with their captive.
They did not, however, carry their prisoner back to
the squaw camp, as he first expected they would,
when, under the circumstances, he anticipated the
usual wretched doom of an Indian prisoner. But,
moving along leisurely until they came to a level
and marshy piece of ground, they paused for a moment,
and seemed in doubt what next to do, when
one, who had aided in carrying the wounded man,
gave his place to another, and approached to him
who seemed to act as leader of the party. He murmured
something, which, from the low tones in
which the Indians usually pitch their voices, Greyslaer
could not overhear.

“Wahss!” (go!) was the brief reply to his communication.

The man beckoned to two others, and the three,
plunging into a copse near by, appeared the next
moment, each with a birchen canoe upon his shoulders.
Crossing the trail they had been travelling,

[figure description] Page 016.[end figure description]

the whole party entered a thicket of alders, where
a thread of water, scarce three inches deep, crept
noiselessly along. The others carefully parted the
bushes, so that the canoemen could let down their
shallops into this slender rill, which was so narrow
that the water was wholly hidden when a canoe
was placed upon its surface.

The wounded man was assigned to the forward
canoe, and Greyslaer, with his arms still pinioned
behind him, placed in the centre. The whole party
were then again soon in motion. The runnel was
too narrow for the use of the paddles, and for some
time they propelled themselves forward merely by
the aid of the bushes which overreached their heads.

At last they came to a spot where the swamp
around them, being confined between two hills,
poured its oozing springs more completely into a
single current. The water, running deeper and
swifter, cuts its way down through the black mould
until a channel of yellow pebbles is revealed beneath
it. The alders are separated more widely
from each other, and grow more in scattered clumps,
which sometimes form green islets, circled with a
fringe of scarlet, wherever their red roots are washed
and polished by the flowing waters.

Now the stream will sweep amid tussocks of long
waving grass, crowned here and there by a broad
branching elm, whose branches dip in the tide, that
whirls in deepening eddies where its projecting
roots overhang the water. Now it ripples for a few
yards over a pebbly bottom, and then, turned by a
spit of yellow sand—thick trodden with the tracks
of deer, of wolves, and not unfrequently with those
of bears and panthers—it slides round a point of
land black with the shade of lfoty pines. A frith of
long wild grass, growing evenly as a fresh-mowed
meadow, and embayed among the thousand points

[figure description] Page 017.[end figure description]

of a tamarack swamp, receives now the spreading
river. And now, again, it is circumscribed once
more into a deep, black, formal-looking pool, circled
with water lilies; and henceforth, around many a
beetling crag, thick sheathed with laurel and the
clustering hemlock, and beneath the shadows of
many a tall mountain rising from forests of basswood
and maple, it marches proudly onward till it
expands into a magnificent lake.

Coasting along the shores of this lake for a mile
or two, they came to an Indian hunter's camp,
which, as it seemed, belonged to the man who furnished
the canoes. The place was offensive from
the smell of dead animals, such as minks, otters,
and musquashes, whose carcasses, stripped of their
skins, were suspended from the boughs of trees
around the cabin as food for the Indian dogs. But
the Indians, notwithstanding their proverbial keenness
of scent, seemed nowise molested by this savoury
atmosphere.[1]

[figure description] Page 018.[end figure description]

Leaving their wounded tribesman under the care
of this worthy, who laid claim to some skill as a
medicine-man, the rest of the party started again
with their captive on the following day, and, crossing
several mountain ridges, and winding their way
among innumerable ponds and lakes, halted near a
beautiful sheet of water, which still bears the name
of Indian Lake, from its having been a sacred place
of resort to the Iroquois.

The outlet of this lake, though it is buried in a
region of lofty and steril mountains, winds through
broad savannas of deep grass, imbowered with
enormous elms, forming a soft and open sylvan
landscape, which is in the most delicious contrast
to the thick and rugged forests which frown from
the adjacent hills. This was the seat of the mysterious
Kenticoys, or solemn meetings of the Mohawks,
when, at the opening and closing year, the
different tribes of the Iroquois retired, each to some
such forest-temple, to worship the Supreme Being,
whose power was alike acknowledged by all.

The prisoner, though treated at this sacred season
with a degree of mildness and forbearance that
was new to him as a trait of Indian character, was
only allowed to approach the threshold of the valley,
where a guardian was appointed him until the
solemn days were over.

The garden-like plain was spread out below the
eminence upon which stood the shanty which was
his temporary prison-house; and Greyslaer could
from time to time discern some plumed band defiling
from the hills and losing themselves among the
far-reaching groves, to which the Indians repaired
from every side. But of the form of their ceremonial
or the nature of their worship he could discern
nothing. Nor has any white man been able to learn

[figure description] Page 019.[end figure description]

more of these periodical gatherings of the Iroquois,
save only their name and their object.[2]

It was two days after these unknown rites were
consummated that Greyslaer found himself ascending
a lofty mountain under the care of his captors,
who still withheld all harsh treatment, while warily
watching him as if they only held him in trust as
the captive of some one more powerful than themselves.
It could scarcely be the wounded Isaac,
however; for, since his first seizure, Greyslaer had
been studiously kept out of the sight of that ferocious
Indian, whose bloody-minded disposition frequently
showed itself during the delirium of fever
under which he was left at the hunter's cabin.

Whatever disposition it was ultimately intended
to make of the prisoner, his life seemed in little
danger during the march; but a measure adopted
by his captors as he now reaches the highest pinnacle
of the mountain seems to indicate that its crisis
is at hand. They have led him to the edge of a
lofty precipice, which commands a view almost
completely around the compass, and motion to him
to cast his eyes above and below him.

It is the hour of autumn sunset, when the golden
air seems to glorify every object on which it
rests. Never did it bathe in molten light a lovelier
landscape of mountain peaks, interminable to
the eye; interlaced by lakes so numerous that,
as these last reflect the tints of the glowing sky,

[figure description] Page 020.[end figure description]

the mountains themselves seem, in their autumn
livery, like rainbow masses floating in liquid ether.
The heart of Greyslaer thrills within him at the
sight; and not the least painful part of the death
that seems to hover near is the thought of closing
his eyes for ever upon such a world of glorious beauty.
But his struggles to prevent them from bandaging
his eyes are vain, for his hands are bound
behind him; and now he stands blinded and helpless
above the gulf into which each moment he expects
to be hurled!

Suddenly he feels a rude hand upon either shoulder,
and he gasps the prayer which he believes to
be his last—but the next moment the two Indians
who have fixed their gripe upon him only turn their
captive round several times, fast held between
them, and lead him away from the precipice. He is
then conscious of gradually descending. Again he
feels that his path leads upward over innumerable
obstacles, which his guides patiently aid him in surmounting.
Once more, again, he is convinced that
he is descending, though his pathway winds so hither
and thither that it is impossible to say how steep
the slope may be.

At last he hears the sound of water faintly dashing
upon the shore. His guides halt and remove
the bandage from his eyes. He looks up, and finds
himself upon the edge of a small lake or mountain
tarn, deep set at the bottom of a rocky bowl or hollow
less than a mile in diameter, circled around by
naked crags and splintered pinnacles of rock, some
straggling copsewood or a blasted tree here and
there alone relieving the utter barrenness of the
scene, which at once conveys the idea of the extinct
crater of a volcano.

This heart-chilling sterility is, however, somewhat
redeemed, when, after circling the lake for a

[figure description] Page 021.[end figure description]

short distance, the Indians come to a few acres of
well-wooded land in a recess of the circular valley.
Here Greyslaer again hears the voices of women
and children from a camp of safety, and resigns
himself to the monotony of captivity in a stronghold
from which there seems no escape.

It were bootless to relate the varied sufferings of
Max Greyslaer during his long winter of captivity
in that dreary mountain, which the Indians call
“The Thunder's Nest:”[3] To tell how he passed
weeks of nearly utter starvation, when fortune failed
the two or three Indian hunters upon whose success
the whole community depended for subsistence:
How he eagerly caught at the relief to his monotonous
existence, when his captors ordered him also
to turn out and hunt the bear, the lynx, and the panther,
the only animals which are found among those
high mountain fastnesses in the winter season, while
the Iroquois themselves pursued on snow-shoes the
moose and red deer in the valleys below: To tell
of the harsh treatment he received, when, weary
and faint, with limbs half frozen and lacerated from
toiling through the frozen snow-crust, he returned
from a fruitless hunt; of the capricious gleams of
kindness of which he was the object when his address
and prowess in the chase awakened alike the
admiration and the jealousy of those who watched
his every motion while pursuing it with him. But
now the spring, which has been long in reaching
this highland region, has, while thickening the forest
around, brought with it the hope of escape,
amid some of those greenwood coverts. It is true
that he is no longer permitted to wander as far as
when the woods were bare. But if he can break
his thraldom for an hour, there is one at hand with

[figure description] Page 022.[end figure description]

both the will and the ability to guide him from the
wilderness.

There has been an accession of numbers to the
Indian camp, bringing rumours that Brant and his
warriors have all left the lower country. And
The Spreading Dew, who came in with the rest,
has even communicated to Greyslaer that Sir John
Johnston and his loyalist retainers, both Indian and
white, have withdrawn from the Valley of the Mohawk
and fled to Canada. The patriots must be in
the ascendency! Why is Greyslaer not there to
share the triumph of his friends?

eaf153v2.n1

[1] A sporting friend, the companion of the author in more than
one excursion among these mountain wilds, seeing some Indians
with whom he hunted busied in removing these objects of annoyance
from the camp as the party approached it, was wholly at a loss
to conceive the motive of placing them where they were found,
until the sudden appearance of two half-famished dogs revealed
the mystery; for it is the custom of a hunter, when leaving his
dogs to protect his camp in his absence, to hang the food prepared
for them at different heights, so that the animal might not devour
all his stores at once, but have to leap higher for it as he grows
leaner.

These dogs, as one might have supposed from their fatigued appearance,
had been off somewhere pursuing the chase for their
own amusement. But, upon this being suggested to the old Indian
hunter, who spoke a few words of broken English, and was more
communicative than most of his race, he was indignant at the idea
of an Indian dog deserting his charge. He pointed to a mountain
peak at the other end of the lake, and assured our friend that they
had been watching for him from its summit, when they saw his
boat upon the water and hurried homeward.

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