Old Tom has taken to a new calling, and has been trying his hand at the traps,” cried Hurry, who had been coolly examining the borderer’s implements; “if that is his humor, and you’re disposed to remain in these parts, we can make an oncommon comfortable season of it; for, while the old man and I out-knowledge the beaver, you can fish, and knock down the deer, to keep body and soul together. I’ve always give the poorest hunters half a share, but one as actyve and sartain as yourself might expect a full one.”
“Thank’ee, Hurry; thank’ee, with all my heart—but I do a little beavering for myself as occasions offer. ’Tis true, the Delawares call me Deerslayer, but it’s not so much because I’m pretty fatal with the venison as because that while I kill so many bucks and does, I’ve never yet taken the life of a fellow-creatur’. They say their traditions do not tell of another who had shed so much blood of animals that had not shed the blood of man.”
“I hope they don’t account you chicken-hearted, lad! A fainthearted man is like a no-tailed beaver.”
“I don’t believe, Hurry, that they account me as out-of-the-way timorsome, even though they may not account me as out-of-the-way brave. But I’m not quarrelsome; and that goes a great way towards keeping blood off the hands, among the hunters and red-skins; and then, Harry March, it keeps blood off the conscience, too.”
“Well, for my part I account game, a red-skin, and a Frenchman as pretty much the same thing; though I’m as onquarrelsome a man, too, as there is in all the colonies. I despise a quarreller as I do a cur-dog; but one has no need to be over-scrupulsome when it’s the right time to show the flint.”
“I look upon him as the most of a man who acts nearest the right, Hurry. But this is a glorious spot, and my eyes never a-weary looking at it!”
“’Tis your first acquaintance with a lake; and these ideas come over us all at such times. Lakes have a gentle character, as I say, being pretty much water and land, and points and bays.”
As this definition by no means met the feelings that were uppermost in the mind of the young hunter, he made no immediate answer, but stood gazing at the dark hills and the glassy water in silent enjoyment.
“Have the Governor’s or the King’s people given this lake a name?” he suddenly asked, as if struck with a new idea. “If they’ve not begun to blaze their trees, and set up their compasses, and line off their maps, it’s likely they’ve not bethought them to disturb natur’ with a name.”
“They’ve not got to that, yet; and the last time I went in with skins, one of the King’s surveyors was questioning me consarning all the region hereabouts. He had heard that there was a lake in this quarter, and had got some general notions about it, such as that there was water and hills; but how much of either, he know’d no more than you know of the Mohawk tongue. I didn’t open the trap any wider than was necessary, giving him but poor encouragement in the way of farms and clearings. In short, I left on his mind some such opinion of this country, as a man gets of a spring of dirty water, with a path to it that is so muddy that one mires afore he sets out. He told me they hadn’t got the spot down yet on their maps, though I conclude that is a mistake, for he showed me his parchment, and there is a lake down on it, where there is no lake in fact, and which is about fifty miles from the place where it ought to be, if they meant it for this. I don’t think my account will encourage him to mark down another, by way of improvement.”
Here Hurry laughed heartily, such tricks being particularly grateful to a set of men who dreaded the approaches of civilization as a curtailment of their own lawless empire. The egregious errors that existed in the maps of the day, all of which were made in Europe, were, moreover, a standing topic of ridicule among them; for, if they had not science enough to make any better themselves, they had sufficient local information to detect the gross blunders contained in those that existed. Any one who will take the trouble to compare these unanswerable evidences of the topographical skill of our fathers a century since, with the more accurate sketches of our own time, will at once perceive that the men of the woods had a sufficient justification for all their criticism on this branch of the skill of the colonial governments, which did not at all hesitate to place a river or a lake a degree or two out of the way, even though they lay within a day’s march of the inhabited parts of the country.
“I’m glad it has no name,” resumed Deerslayer, “or at least, no pale-face name; for their christenings always foretell waste and destruction. No doubt, howsoever, the red-skins have their modes of knowing it, and the hunters and trappers, too; they are likely to call the place by something reasonable and resembling.”
“As for the tribes, each has its tongue, and its own way of calling things; and they treat this part of the world just as they treat all others. Among ourselves, we’ve got to calling the place the ‘Glimmerglass,’ seeing that its whole basin is so often hinged with pines, cast upward to its face as if it would throw back the hills that hang over it.”
“There is an outlet, I know, for all lakes have outlets, and the rock at which I am to meet Chingachgook stands near an outlet. Has that no colony-name yet?”
“In that particular they’ve got the advantage of us, having one end, and that the biggest, in their own keeping: they’ve given it a name which has found its way up to its source; names nat’rally working up stream. No doubt, Deerslayer, you’ve seen the Susquehannah, down in the Delaware country?”
“That have I, and hunted along its banks a hundred times.”
“That and this are the same in fact, and, I suppose, the same in sound. I am glad they’ve been compelled to keep the redmen’s name, for it would be too hard to rob them of both land and name!”
Deerslayer made no answer; but he stood leaning on his rifle, gazing at the view which so much delighted him. The reader is not to suppose, however, that it was the picturesque alone which so strongly attracted his attention. The spot was very lovely, of a truth, and it was then seen in one of its most favorable moments, the surface of the lake being as smooth as glass and as limpid as pure air, throwing back the mountains, clothed in dark pines, along the whole of its eastern boundary, the points thrusting forward their trees even to nearly horizontal lines, while the bays were seen glittering through an occasional arch beneath, left by a vault fretted with branches and leaves. It was the air of deep repose—the solitudes, that spoke of scenes and forests untouched by the hands of man—the reign of nature, in a word, that gave so much pure delight to one of his habits and turn of mind. Still, he felt, though it was unconsciously, like a poet also. If he found a pleasure in studying this large, and to him unusual opening into the mysteries and forms of the woods, as one is gratified in getting broader views of any subject that has long occupied his thoughts, he was not insensible to the innate loveliness of such a landscape neither, but felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy cairn of nature.
“Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
And yet it irks me, the poor dappled foals,—
Being native burghers of this desert city,—
Should, in their own confines, with forked heads
Have their round haunches gored.”
As You Like It, II.i.21–25
Hurry
