The winter, what with hunting and trapping, passed quickly. The wild, free life with all its hardships and annoyances appealed to Rodney, and he came to understand how children taken captives by the Indians, and 103 later returned to their parents, would occasionally run away and rejoin the red folk. His home ties were too strong, however, for him to entertain such a thought, and he lay awake many nights wondering how he might make his escape.
The severity of the winter had greatly weakened Ahneota. The skin was drawn over his cheekbones like parchment. He was so lame with rheumatism that he needed constant care and the boy served him in many ways.
The hunters, though few in number, had gathered a fine lot of furs, and, when the ice was breaking up in the streams, the sugar maples were tapped. Their implements for this purpose were crude. Their method consisted in cutting a gash through the bark with a tomahawk and into this driving a chip which served as a “spile” to conduct the dripping sap into the dishes of elm bark, from which it was taken and boiled into sugar. This sugar was often mixed with bear’s fat and stored in sacks made of skins, a mixture much prized by the Indians.
A little later the tribe returned to the bluff where Rodney was first introduced to its life, there to plant the corn and tobacco.
Rumours of trouble with the whites increased. The latter part of May François returned, but without Maman and Louis, and he brought, to trade for the valuable furs, rifles and ammunition and brandy, and waxed rich, while the savages with their new implements of war became more restless.
CHAPTER XIII
THE BEGINNING OF WAR
From the history of those days one learns that there were white savages who compared unfavourably with the red ones.