And what had become of the former inhabitants of the soil? where were the dusky men who met the strange creatures upon the shore, and bade them welcome, and gave them the fat things of the sea and the land for their subsistence, and warm furs to protect them from the searching winds of the Snow-Moon, and taught them how to follow the trail of forest animals, and to thread, unerringly, their way for many successive nights through the lonely wilderness, by the flow of streams and the course of fishes, and the light of the Hunter's Star, and the moss upon the oaks, and the flight of birds? Listen, and I will tell you.
He sees upon the edge of a stream, overgrown with a thick grove of alders and luxuriant vines, an Indian man and woman. The woman held in her arms a dying child—at the feet of the man, lay a lean and famished dog. Deep thought was in the eye of the one, and absorbing grief in that of the other. Now the hunter cast his eyes into the depths of the river in anxious search for the signs of the approach of the finny people; now he laid his ear to the earth after the manner of his race, when they would detect the sound of footsteps.
"Didst thou see aught in the current, which thine eye is searching?" asked the wife tremulously, fixing her bright black eye, moistened with a tear, upon her hungry infant.
"I saw nothing in the current," answered the hunter. "The net of the stranger hath swept from the flood that which was in part the food of our tribes, when he first became acquainted with these shores. The barbed spear no more brings up the sleeping conger; the Indian throws his hook into the once populous stream, but it returns with the bait untouched."
"Did thy quick ear catch the sound of aught in the mazes of the wood?" asked the fond mother, and her tears fell thick on the cheeks of her little babe.
"My ear caught no sound in the mazes of the wood," answered the hunter. "How should it? The stranger hath left nothing save the mouse, and the mole, and few of them. He has swept away the beloved retreats of the bounding beauty of the forest, the nimble deer, and none are left in the glades, where once they were thicker than the stars. The bear, and the wolf, and the panther, love not their crafty brother, and have gone yet deeper into the forest. The wild duck feeds now in the deep waters only, the mother teaches her brood that death lurks behind the wood-skirted shore."
"Then must this little child—thine and mine—our first-born, die of hunger. Yet bethink thee. I see among yonder lofty trees a cabin, the whiteness of which tells us that one of the despoilers of our joys hath there taken up his abode."
"Wouldst thou have the son of Alknomook—the son of the rightful lord—himself the rightful lord of these wide regions—beg bread from the stranger?"
"Not to save thy life or mine would I ask it, but what would I not do to save the life of this beautiful babe, which the Great Spirit granted to my prayers, when for sixty moons I had lived in thy cabin a disgraced woman(3)."
"Not therefore should the soul of an Indian warrior bend to a master. I cannot beg."