“Hardship and suffering! Why, they fell short of provisions long before they got out of the wilderness, and, besides the hardships of cold and fatigue, came near starving to death! I have heard my father tell how he was one of a party of thirteen, who, with other like squads, were permitted to scatter forward in search of some inhabitants, for food, lest they all perished together; how, after going two days without putting a morsel into their mouths, except their shoe-strings or the inner bark of trees, they at length were gladdened by the sight of an opening, with a log house, and a cow standing before the door; how, the instant their eyes fell on the cow, they ran like blood-hounds for the spot, seized an axe, brought the animal to the ground, ripped up the hide on one thigh, cut off slices of the quivering flesh, and, by the time the aroused family had got out into the yard, were munching and gobbling them down raw, with the desperate eagerness of ravenous beasts.”[4]
“Horrible! but they paid the poor people for their cow, I trust?”
“Yes, twice over, but that did not reconcile them to the loss of their only cow, where it was so difficult to get another. The children screamed, and even the man and his wife wrung their hands and cried as if their hearts would break.”
“That incident is to me a new feature among the horrors of war, which I probably should have never heard of but for coming here and making this curious discovery of one of the relics of that terrible and fruitless campaign of our Revolution. I am glad we concluded to come.”
“So am I; for that, and the other reason that I wanted to see the lay of the country, round this river, where, as it happened, I had never been. But my mind misgave me several times, on the way.”
“Why so, pray?”
“I can hardly tell, myself, but I began to kinder feel as if something wrong was going on somewhere, and that, though this place could not be more than five miles from our upper camp, where we stayed last night, we had yet better be making our way directly back to the lake. Besides that, I haven’t liked the symptoms of the weather, to-day.”
“I don’t know that I have noticed any thing peculiar in the weather, except a chilliness of the air that I have not felt before this season.”
“That’s the thing,” rejoined the hunter, glancing uneasily up through the treetops, to try to get a view of the sky. “But there are other indications I don’t fancy. There is a peculiar raw dampness in the air, and a sort of low, moaning sound heard once in a while murmuring along through the forest, such as I have often noticed before great storms, and sudden changes from fall to winter weather, this time of the year. And hush! hark!” he exclaimed, suddenly cutting short his remark, as the well-known, solemn, and quickly-repeated konk! konk! of wild geese, on their passage, greeted their ears.
They ran down to the water’s edge to get a view of the open sky, when, looking up, they saw a large flock of these winged, semi-annual voyagers of the air, coming in view over the forest, in their usual widespread, harrow-shaped battalions, and with seemingly hurried flight, pitching down from the British highlands toward the lower regions to the south. And that flock had scarcely receded beyond hearing, when another, and yet another, with the same uneasy cries and rapid flight, passed, in quick succession, over the open reach of sky above them.