Lost in the Backwoods: A Tale of the Canadian Forest

by Catharine Parr Strickland Traill

The Indians offered the first of the birds as an oblation to the Great Spirit, as a grateful acknowledgment of his bounty in having allowed them to gather food thus plentifully for their families. Sometimes distant tribes with whom they were on terms of friendship were invited to share the sport and partake of the spoils.

Indiana could not understand why Hector did not follow the custom of her Indian fathers, and offer the first duck or the best fish to propitiate the Great Spirit. Hector told her that the God he worshipped desired no sacrifice; that his holy Son, when he came down from heaven and gave himself as a sacrifice for the sin of the world, had satisfied his Father, the Great Spirit, an hundredfold.

They feasted now continually upon the water-fowl, and Catharine learned from Indiana how to skin them, and so preserve the feathers for making tippets, and bonnets, and ornamental trimmings, which are not only warm, but light and very becoming. They split open the birds they did not require for present consumption, and dried them for winter store, smoking some after the manner the Shetlanders and the Orkney people smoke the solan geese. Their shanty displayed an abundant store of provisions—fish, flesh, and fowl, besides baskets of wild rice and bags of dried fruit.

One day Indiana came in from the brow of the hill, and told the boys that the lake eastward was covered with canoes, she showed, by holding up her two hands and then three fingers, that she had counted thirteen. The tribes had met for the annual duck-feast and the rice-harvest. She advised them to put out the fire, so that no smoke might be seen to attract them, but said they would not leave the lake for hunting over the plains just then, as the camp was lower down on the point [Footnote: This point, commonly known as Andersen's Point, now the seat of an Indian village, used in former times to be a great place of rendezvous for the Indians, and was the scene of a murderous carnage or massacre that took place about eighty years ago; the war weapons and bones of the Indians are often turned up with the plough at this day.] east of the mouth of a big river, which she called "Otonabee."

Hector asked Indiana if she would go away and leave them in the event of meeting with any of her own tribe. The girl cast her eyes on the earth in silence; a dark cloud seemed to gather over her face.

"If they should prove to be any of your father's people, or a friendly tribe, would you go away with them?" he again repeated; to which she solemnly replied,—

"Indiana has no father, no tribe, no people; no blood of her father warms the heart of any man, woman, or child, saving herself alone. But Indiana is a brave, and the daughter of a brave, and will not shrink from danger: her heart is warm; red blood flows warm here," and she laid her hand on her heart. Then lifting up her hand, she said in slow but impassioned tone, "They left not one drop of living blood to flow in any veins but these." She raised her eyes, and stretched her arms upwards toward heaven, as though calling down vengeance on the murderers of her father's house.

"My father was a Mohawk, the son of a great chief, who owned these hunting-grounds far as your eye can see to the rising and setting sun, along the big waters of the big lakes; but the Ojebwas, a portion of the Chippewa nation, by treachery cut off my father's people by hundreds in cold blood, when they were defenceless and at rest. It was a bloody day and a bloody deed."

Instead of hiding herself, as Hector and Louis strongly advised the young Mohawk to do, she preferred remaining, as a scout, she said, under the cover of the bushes on the edge of the steep that overlooked the lake, to watch the movements of the Indians. She told Hector to be under no apprehension if they came to the hut; not to attempt to conceal themselves, but offer them food to eat and water to drink. "If they come to the house and find you away, they will take your stores and burn your roof, suspecting that you are afraid to meet them openly; but they will not harm you if you meet them with open hand and fearless brow: if they eat of your bread, they will not harm you; me they would kill by a cruel death—the war-knife is in their heart against the daughter of the brave."

The boys thought Indiana's advice good, and they felt no fear for themselves, only for Catharine, whom they counselled to remain in the shanty with Wolfe.