1760-1763.] THE PRACTISED WOODSMAN. 159 



anchorite could fare worse, no' hero could dare 

 more ; yet his wild, hard life has resistless charms ; 

 and, while he can wield a rifle, he will never leave 

 it. Go with him to the rendezvous, and he is a 

 stoic no more. Here, rioting among his comrades, 

 his native appetites break loose in mad excess, in 

 deep carouse, and desperate gaming. Then follow 

 close the quarrel, the challenge, the fight, ■ — two 

 rusty rifles and fifty yards of prairie. 



The nursling of civilization, placed in the midst 

 of the forest, and abandoned to his own resources, 

 is helpless as an infant. There is no clew to the 

 labyrinth. Bewildered and amazed, he circles 

 round and round in hopeless wanderings. Despair 

 and famine make him their prey, and unless the 

 birds of heaven minister to his wants, he dies in 

 misery. Not so the practised woodsman. To him, 

 the forest is a home. It yields him food, shelter, 

 and • raiment, and he threads its trackless depths 

 with undeviating foot. To lure the game, to cir- 

 cumvent the lurking foe, to guide his course by the 

 stars, the wind, the streams, or the trees, — such 

 are the arts which the white man has learned from 

 the red. Often, indeed, the pupil has outstripped 

 his master. He can hunt as well ; he can fight 

 better ; and yet there are niceties of the woods- 

 man's craft in which the white man must yield the 

 palm to his savage rival. Seldom can he boast, in 

 equal measure, that subtlety of sense, more akin to 

 the instinct of brutes than to human reason, which 

 reads the signs of the forest as the scholar reads 

 the printed page, to which the whistle of a bird 



