A Hero of Ticonderoga

by Rowland Evans Robinson

Seth looked eagerly for the promised trail and was glad to discover the blazed trees and the netted imprint of snowshoes, that, if but briefly, as certainly, identified the path. He turned his oxen into the diverging road, which, though narrow, gave ample room for the sled. After a little it led to the winding channel of a creek crawling through a marsh, whose looped and matted sedges were in turn bordered by the primeval forest and its bristling abatis of great trees, prostrate and bent in every degree of incline.

At last, as the long shadows began to thicken into the pallid gloom of winter twilight, a little cabin was discovered in a notch of clearing, as gray and silent as the gray woods around it. A thin wisp of smoke climbed from the low chimney against the wall of forest, and a waft of its pungent odor came to the travellers. Even as they drew near, its owner also arrived, and gave them hospitable welcome to his hearth, and presently the little room was aglow with light and warmth.

Here Ruth and little Martha thawed away their cramps and chilliness by the big fireplace, while Seth and his son Nathan, with the hunter’s help, unhitched the oxen from the sled. From this they brought the rations of hay and corn, and made the oxen and their comrade, the cow, contented with their roofless lodging behind the cabin.

Then the pork and Indian meal were taken inside. Ruth mixed a johnny-cake with hot water and salt, and set it to bake on its board, tilted before the fire. The frying-pan was filled with pork, and slices of moose meat contributed from Job’s larder.

The little party, ranged on rude seats about the fireplace, so great as to be out of all proportion to the room, chatted of things near and afar, while they grew hungry with every sniff of appetizing cookery.

Nathan was all agog at the peltry that hung from innumerable pegs on the rough log walls. There were skins of many animals that had long been rare, if not extinct, in the old colony where he was born.

There were the broad, round shields of beaver skins, the slenderer and lighter-hued skins of otters, besides the similarly shaped but smaller and darker-colored fisher, with a bundle of the lesser martins, that Job called “saple,” and no end of muskrats and minks. There were, also, half a dozen wolf skins, and, conspicuous in size and glossy blackness, were three bear skins, and beside them hung a tawny panther hide, the huge hinder paws and long tail trailing on the puncheon floor, while the cat-like head seemed to prowl, as stealthily as in life, among the upper shadows and flickerings of the firelight.

Quickly noting the boy’s interest in these trophies, Job made the round of them all, explaining the habits of each animal, the method of its capture, and giving brief narrations of encounters with the larger ones. He exhibited, with the most pride, a beautiful silver-gray foxskin, and an odd-looking spotted and coarse-haired skin, stuffed with moss into some semblance of its form in the flesh. This he brought to the fireside, and set on its fin-like hinder feet, for the inspection of his guests.

“What on airth is it?” Seth Beeman asked.

“’Tain’t of the airth, but of the water,” Job answered, with a chuckle. “I killed it on the ice of the lake airly in the winter. One of the sojers at the Fort see it, an’ he says it’s a seal fish belongin’ to the sea, where he’s seen no end on ’em. But them sojers to the Fort is an ign’ant set like all the reg’lars, that we rangers always despised as bad as they did us, an’ it don’t look no ways reasonable that sech a creatur’ could come all the way up the St. Lawrence, an’ the Iriquois River, an’ most the len’th o’ this lake. My idee is, it’s a fresh-water maremaid, an’ nat’ral to this lake.”