Page 14 - A Hero of Ticonderoga

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."