Mansker himself came back, a leader among his comrades, and hunted many years in the woods alone or with others of his kind, and saw and did many strange things.  One winter he and those who were with him built a skin house from the hides of game, and when their ammunition gave out they left three of their number and all of their dogs at the skin house and went to the settlements for powder and lead.  When they returned they found that two of the men had been killed and the other chased away by the Indians, who, however, had not found the camp.  The dogs, having seen no human face for three months, were very wild, yet in a few days became as tame and well trained as ever.  They killed such enormous quantities of buffalo, elk, and especially deer, that they could not pack the hides into camp, and one of the party, during an idle moment and in a spirit of protest against fate,[24] carved on the peeled trunk of a fallen poplar, where it long remained, the sentence:  “2300 deer skins lost; ruination by God!” The soul of this thrifty hunter must have been further grieved when a party of Cherokees visited their camp and took away all the camp utensils and five hundred hides.  The whites found the broad track they made in coming in, but could not find where they had gone out, each wily redskin then covering his own trail, and the whole number apparently breaking up into several parties.

Sometimes the Indians not only plundered the hunting camps but killed the hunters as well, and the hunters retaliated in kind.  Often the white men and red fought one another whenever they met, and displayed in their conflicts all the cunning and merciless ferocity that made forest warfare so dreadful.  Terrible deeds of prowess were done by the mighty men on either side.  It was a war of stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless, sleepless watchfulness.  The contestants had sinewy frames and iron wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as bold as they were ruthless.  Their moccasined feet made no sound as they stole softly on the camp of a sleeping enemy or crept to ambush him while he himself still-hunted or waylaid the deer.  A favorite stratagem was to imitate the call of game, especially the gobble of the wild turkey, and thus to lure the would-be hunter to his fate.  If the deceit was guessed at, the caller was himself stalked.  The men grew wonderfully expert in detecting imitation.  One old hunter, Castleman by name, was in after years fond of describing how an Indian nearly lured him to his death.  It was in the dusk of the evening, when he heard the cries of two great wood owls near him.  Listening attentively, he became convinced that all was not right.  “The woo-woo call and the woo-woo answer were not well timed and toned, and the babel-chatter was a failure.  More than this, they seemed to be on the ground.”  Creeping cautiously up, and peering through the brush, he saw something the height of a stump between two forked trees.  It did not look natural; he aimed, pulled trigger, and killed an Indian.