They Do Not Stop To Cook Their Meals
Upon The Bank, Nor Land, Except To Carry Their Canoe About The
Falls.
The stolen birch forgets its master and does them good
service, and the swollen current bears them swiftly along with
little need of the paddle, except to steer and keep them warm by
exercise.
For ice is floating in the river; the spring is
opening; the muskrat and the beaver are driven out of their holes
by the flood; deer gaze at them from the bank; a few
faint-singing forest birds, perchance, fly across the river to
the northernmost shore; the fish-hawk sails and screams overhead,
and geese fly over with a startling clangor; but they do not
observe these things, or they speedily forget them. They do not
smile or chat all day. Sometimes they pass an Indian grave
surrounded by its paling on the bank, or the frame of a wigwam,
with a few coals left behind, or the withered stalks still
rustling in the Indian's solitary cornfield on the interval. The
birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has
been burned down to be made into a canoe, these are the only
traces of man, - a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the
primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the
"South Sea"; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but
to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the
smile of the Great Spirit.
While we loiter here this autumn evening, looking for a spot
retired enough, where we shall quietly rest to-night, they thus,
in that chilly March evening, one hundred and forty-two years
before us, with wind and current favoring, have already glided
out of sight, not to camp, as we shall, at night, but while two
sleep one will manage the canoe, and the swift stream bear them
onward to the settlements, it may be, even to old John Lovewell's
house on Salmon Brook to-night.
According to the historian, they escaped as by a miracle all
roving bands of Indians, and reached their homes in safety, with
their trophies, for which the General Court paid them fifty
pounds. The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once
more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the
apple-tree, and there have been many who in later times have
lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.
This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton
wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great
for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the
English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman
by the Greek. "We must look a long way back," says Raleigh, "to
find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing
kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men
go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing
remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition."
And yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the Penacooks
and Pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on
the banks of the Merrimack.
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