At the period of which we are writing, the climate of these States
differed materially from that which is now known to their inhabitants. A
winter in the Province of Connecticut was attended by many successive
falls of snow, until the earth was entirely covered with firmly
compressed masses of the frozen element. Occasional thaws and passing
storms of rain, that were driven away by a return of the clear and
cutting cold of the north-western gales, were wont at times to lay a
covering on the ground, that was congealed to the consistency of ice,
until men, and not unfrequently beasts, and sometimes sleighs, were seen
moving on its surface, as on the bed of a frozen lake. During the
extremity of a season like this, the hardy borderers, who could not toil
in their customary pursuits, were wont to range the forest in quest of
game, which, driven for food to known resorting places in the woods,
then fell most easily a prey to the intelligence and skill of such men as
Eben Dudley and Reuben Ring.
The youths never left the dwellings on these hunts, without exciting the
most touching interest in their movements, on the part of the Indian boy,
On all such occasions, he would linger at the loops of his prison
throughout the day, listening intently to the reports of the distant
muskets, as they resounded in the forest; and the only time, during a
captivity of so many months, that he was ever seen to smile, was when he
examined the grim look and muscular claws of a dead panther, that had
fallen beneath the aim of Dudley, in one of these excursions to the
mountains.
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