As has been alluded to already, the principal chiefs, on a suggestion of Bear’s Meat, had followed the young men down the Kalamazoo, dividing themselves by a part of their body’s crossing the stream at the first favorable spot.  In this way the Indians proceeded, sweeping the river before them, and examining every place that seemed capable of concealing a canoe.  Runners were kept in constant motion between the several parties, in order to let the state of the search be known to all; and, feigning to be one of these very men, Pigeonswing had held communication with several whom he purposely met, and to whom he imparted such invented information as contributed essentially to send the young men forward on a false scent.  In this way, the main body of the savages descended the river some sixty miles, following its windings, in the first day and a half.  Here Pigeonswing left them, turning his own face up stream, in order to rejoin his friends.  Of Peter he had no knowledge; neither knowing, nor otherwise learning, what had become of the great chief.  On his way up stream, Pigeonswing met several more Indians; runners like himself, or as he seemed to be; or scouts kept on the lookout for the fugitives.  He had no difficulty in deceiving these men.  None of them had been of Crowsfeather’s party, and he was a stranger to them all.  Ignorant of his real character, they received his information without distrust, and the orders he pretended to convey were obeyed by them without the smallest hesitation.  In this way, then, Pigeonswing contrived to send all the scouts he met away from the river, by telling them that there was reason to think the pale-faces had abandoned the stream, and that it was the wish of Bear’s Meat that their trail should be looked for in the interior.  This was the false direction that he gave to all, thereby succeeding better even than he had hoped in clearing the banks of the Kalamazoo of observers and foes.  Nevertheless, many of those whom he knew to be out, some quite in the rear of the party, and others in its front, and at no great distance from them, he did not meet; of course he could not get his false directions to their ears.  There were, in fact, so many of the Indians and so few of the whites, that it was an easy matter to cover the path with young warriors, any one party of whom would be strong enough to capture two men and as many women.

Having told the tale of his own doings, Pigeonswing next came to his proposition for the mode of future proceeding.  He proposed that the family should get into the canoes that very night, and commence its flight by going down the stream directly toward its foes!  This sounded strangely, but there did not seem to be any alternative.  A march across the peninsula would be too much for the females, and there was the certainty that their trail would be found.  It may seem strange to those who are unacquainted with the American Indian, and his habits, to imagine that, in so large an expanse, the signs of the passage