The two brothers were thus left in the wilderness alone, separated by several hundred miles from home, surrounded by hostile Indians, and destitute of every thing but their rifles.  After having had such melancholy experience of the dangers to which they were exposed, we would naturally suppose that their fortitude would have given way, and that they would instantly have returned to the settlements.  But the most remarkable feature in Boone’s character was a calm and cold equanimity which rarely rose to enthusiasm and never sunk to despondence.

His courage undervalued the danger to which he was exposed, and his presence of mind, which never forsook him, enabled him, on all occasions to take the best means of avoiding it.  The wilderness, with all its dangers and privations, had a charm for him, which is scarcely conceivable by one brought up in a city; and he determined to remain alone while his brother returned to Carolina for an additional supply of ammunition, as their original supply was nearly exhausted.  His situation we should now suppose in the highest degree gloomy and dispiriting.  The dangers which attended his brother on his return were nearly equal to his own; and each had left a wife and children, which Boone acknowledged cost him many an anxious thought.

But the wild and solitary grandeur of the country around him, where not a tree had been cut, nor a house erected, was to him an inexhaustible source of admiration and delight; and he says to himself, that some of the most rapturous moments of his life were spent in those lonely rambles.  The utmost caution was necessary to avoid the savages, and scarcely less to escape the ravenous hunger of the wolves that prowled nightly around him in immense numbers.  He was compelled frequently to shift his lodging, and by undoubted signs, saw that the Indians had repeatedly visited his hut during his absence.  He some times lay in canebrakes without fire, and heard the yells of the Indians around him.  Fortunately, however, he never encountered them.[17]

Mr. Perkins, in his Annals of the West, speaking of this sojourn of the brothers in the wilderness, says:  And now commenced that most extraordinary life on the part of these two men which has, in a great measure, served to give celebrity to their names; we refer to their residence, entirely alone, for more than a year, in a land filled with the most subtle and unsparing enemies, and under the influence of no other motive, apparently, than a love of adventure, of Nature, and of solitude.  Nor were they, during this time, always together.  For three months, Daniel remained amid the forest utterly by himself, while his brother, with courage and capacity equal to his own, returned to North Carolina for a supply of powder and lead; with which he succeeded in rejoining the roamer of the wilderness in safety in July, 1770.