In one corner of the hut was a pile of well-dressed bearskins, three in number, each and all of which had been taken from the carcasses of fallen foes, within the last two months.  Three more were stretched on saplings, near by, in the process of curing.  It was a material part of the bee-hunter’s craft to kill this animal, in particular; and the trophies of his conflicts with them were proportionably numerous.  On the pile already prepared, he usually slept.

There was a very rude table, a single board set up on sticks; and a bench or two, together with a wooden chest of some size, completed the furniture.  Tools were suspended from the walls, it is true; and no less than three rifles, in addition to a very neat double-barrelled “shot-gun,” or fowling-piece, were standing in a corner.  These were arms collected by our hero in his different trips, and retained quite as much from affection as from necessity, or caution.  Of ammunition, there was no very great amount visible; only three or four horns and a couple of pouches being suspended from pegs:  but Ben had a secret store, as well as another rifle, carefully secured, in a natural magazine and arsenal, at a distance sufficiently great from the chiente to remove it from all danger of sharing in the fortunes of his citadel, should disaster befall the last.

The cooking was done altogether out of doors.  For this essential comfort, le Bourdon had made very liberal provision.  He had a small oven, a sufficiently convenient fire-place, and a storehouse, at hand; all placed near the spring, and beneath the shade of a magnificent elm.  In the storehouse he kept his barrel of flour, his barrel of salt, a stock of smoked or dried meat, and that which the woodsman, if accustomed in early life to the settlements, prizes most highly, a half-barrel of pickled pork.  The bark canoe had sufficed to transport all these stores, merely ballasting handsomely that ticklish craft; and its owner relied on the honey to perform the same office on the return voyage, when trade or consumption should have disposed of the various articles just named.

The reader may smile at the word “trade,” and ask where were those to be found who could be parties to the traffic.  The vast lakes and innumerable rivers of that region, however, remote as it then was from the ordinary abodes of civilized man, offered facilities for communication that the active spirit of trade would be certain not to neglect.  In the first place, there were always the Indians to barter skins and furs against powder, lead, rifles, blankets, and unhappily “fire-water.”  Then, the white men who penetrated to those semi-wilds were always ready to “dicker” and to “swap,” and to “trade” rifles, and watches, and whatever else they might happen to possess, almost to their wives and Children.