and a waterfall, where the river was a mile wide and unfrozen.  Radisson was constrained to witness many acts against the Eries, which must have one of two effects on white blood,—­either turn the white man into a complete savage, or disgust him utterly with savage life.  Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy.[11] Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Snow still lay in great drifts under the shadow of hemlock and spruce; and the braves skimmed forward winged with the noiseless speed of snow-shoes.  When the snow became too soft from thaw for snow-shoes, they paused to build themselves a skiff.  It was too early to peel the bark off the birch, so they made themselves a dugout of the walnut tree.  The wind changed from north to south, clearing the lakes of ice and filling the air with the earthy smells of up-bursting growth.  “There was such a thawing,” writes Radisson, “ye little brookes flowed like rivers, which made us embark to wander over that sweet sea.”  Lounging in their skiff all day, carried from shore to shore with the waves, and sleeping round camp-fires on the sand each night, the young braves luxuriated in all the delights of sunny idleness and spring life.  But this was not war.  It was play, and play of the sort that weans the white man from civilization to savagery.

One day a scout, who had climbed to the top of a tree, espied two strange squaws.  They were of a hostile tribe.  The Mohawk bloodthirst was up as a wolf’s at the sight of lambs.  In vain Radisson tried to save the women by warning the Iroquois that if there were women, there must be men, too, who would exact vengeance for the squaws’ death.  The young braves only laid their plans the more carefully for his warning and massacred the entire encampment.  Prisoners were taken, but when food became scarce they were brutally knocked on the head.  These tribes had never heard guns before, and at the sound of shots fled as from diabolical enemies.  It was an easy matter for the young braves in the course of a few weeks to take a score of scalps and a dozen prisoners.  At one place more than two hundred beaver were trapped.  At the end of the raid, the booty was equally divided.  Radisson asked that the woman prisoner be given to him; and he saved her from torture and death on the return to the Mohawks by presenting her as a slave to his Indian mother.  All his other share of booty he gave to the friendly family.  The raid was over.  He had failed of his main object in joining it.  He had not escaped.  But he had made one important gain.  His valor had reestablished the confidence of the Indians so that when they went on a free-booting expedition