A Hero of Ticonderoga

by Rowland Evans Robinson

Waiting but a moment to stroke the glossy fur and lift a huge inert paw, but such a little while ago so terrible, he sped home to bring his mother and sister to see the unexpected prize, while the jays renewed their querulous outcry, and the squirrel vociferously scoffed the fallen despoiler of his stolen nuts.

The flesh made a welcome addition to the settler’s scanty store of meat, the fat furnished a medium for frying the hitherto impossible doughnut, and Job promised to bring them a handsome price for the skin, when he should sell it with his own peltry to the fur traders. But the praise he bestowed upon Seth’s coolness in the strange encounter was sweeter to Nathan than all else.

As the days went on the advance of spring became more rapid and more apparent. Already the clearing was free from snow, and even in the shadow of the forest the tops of the cradle knolls showed the brown mats of last year’s leaves above the surface, that was no longer a pure white, but littered with the winter downfall of twigs, moss, and bits of bark, and everywhere it was gray with innumerable swarming mites of snow fleas. Great flocks of wild geese harrowed the sky. Ducks went whistling in swift flight just above the tree tops, or settled in the puddles beginning to form along the border of the marsh. Here muskrats were getting first sight of the sun after months of twilight spent beneath the ice.

In the earliest April days of open water, when the blackbirds, on every bordering elm and water maple, were filling the air with a jangle of harsh and liquid notes, and the frogs, among the drift of floating weeds, were purring an unremitting croak, Job took Nathan out on the marshes, and instructed him in the art of shooting the great pickerel now come to spawn in the warm shallows.

“Never shoot at ’em,” said he, when a shot from his smooth-bore had turned an enormous fellow’s white belly to the sun, and he quickly lifted the fish into the canoe; “if you do, you won’t hit ’em. Always shoot under, a mite or more, accordin’ to the depth o’ water.”

Powder and lead were too precious to waste much of them on fish, so the old hunter made his pupil a hornbeam bow and arrows with spiked heads. With these weapons the boy soon became so skilled that he kept the table well supplied with this agreeable variation of its frugal fare.

Song-birds came in fewer numbers in those days of wide wildernesses than now, but there were bluebirds and song sparrows enough to enliven the clearing with sweet songs, and little Martha found squirrel cups blooming in the warmest corners of the field. As the days grew longer and warmer they grew busier, for Seth was diligently getting his crops in among the black stumps.

Job, having foreseen his friend’s need of some sort of water craft when the lake should open, had fashioned for him a log canoe from the trunk of a great pine, and modelled it as gracefully as his own birch, though it was many times a heavier, as it was a steadier, craft.

One pleasant afternoon in early May, when the lake was quite clear of ice, Seth and his son, with Job as their instructor in the art of canoe navigation, made a trip in the new boat. They paddled down the creek, now a broad bit of water from the spring overflow. When they came to the lake, rippled with a brisk northern breeze, they found their visit well timed, for a rare and pretty sight was before them, so rare and pretty that Job paddled back with all speed for the mother and daughter that they, too, might see it.

A mile below the mouth of the creek a large vessel was coming, under all sail, with the British flag flying bravely above the white cloud of canvas. They could hear the inspiring strains of martial music, and, when the noble vessel swept past not half a mile away, they could see the gayly dressed officers and the blue-jacketed sailors swarming on her deck.