“Then you believe right, Robert.  I never told you in so many words before, but I’ve been in Europe.  I’ll talk to you about it another time, not now, and I’ll choose where and when.”

He spoke so positively that Robert did not pursue the topic, knowing that if the hunter wished to avoid it he had good reasons.  Yet he felt anew that David Willet, called the Great Bear by the Iroquois, had not spent his whole life in the woods and that when the time came he could tell a tale.  There was always the fact that Willet spoke excellent English, so unlike the vernacular of the hunters.

The afternoon was waning fast.  The sun was setting in an ocean of fire that turned the blue line of the mountains in the east to red.  The slope of the land made the current of the river much swifter, and Robert and Willet drew in their paddles, leaving the work to Tayoga alone, who sat in the prow and guided their light craft with occasional strokes, letting the stream do the rest.

There was no more expert canoeman than Tayoga in the whole northern wilderness.  A single sweep of his paddle would send the canoe to any point he wished, and apparently it was made without effort.  There was no shortening of the breath nor any sudden and violent movement of his figure.  It was all as smooth and easy as the flowing of the water itself.  It seemed that Tayoga was doing nothing, and that the canoe once more was alive, the master of its own course.

The ocean of fire faded into a sea of gray, and then black night came, but the canoe sped on in the swift current toward the St. Lawrence.  It was still the wilderness.  The green forest on either side of the stream was unbroken.  No smoke from a settler’s chimney trailed across the sky.  It was the forest as the Indian had known it for centuries.  Robert, sitting in the center of the canoe, quit dreaming of great cities and came back to his own time and place.  He felt the majesty of all that surrounded him, but he was not lonely, nor was he oppressed.  Instead, the night, the great forest, the swift river and the gliding canoe appealed to his sensitive and highly imaginative mind.  He was uplifted and he felt the confidence and elation that contribute so much to success.

It was characteristic of the three, so diverse in type, and yet knitted so closely together in friendship, that they would talk much at times and at other times have silence long and complete.  Now, neither spoke for at least three hours.  Tayoga, in the prow, made occasional strokes of his paddle, but the current remained swift and the speed of the canoe was not slackened.  The young Onondaga devoted most of his time to watching.  Much wreckage from storms or the suction of flood water often floated on the surface of these wild rivers, and his keen eyes searched for trunk or bough or snag.  They also scanned at intervals the green walls speeding by on either side, lest they might pass some camp fire and not notice it, but finding no lighter note in the darkness he felt sure that no hostile bands were near.