Chapter 9

Now, my co-mates and partners in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we but the penalty of Adam.
_As You Like It._

Sergeant Dunham made no empty vaunt when he gave the promise
conveyed in the closing words of the last chapter. Notwithstanding
the remote frontier position of the post they who lived at it
enjoyed a table that, in many respects, kings and princes might
have envied. At the Period of our tale, and, indeed, for half a
century later, the whole of that vast region which has been called
the West, or the new countries since the war of the revolution,
lay a comparatively unpeopled desert, teeming with all the living
productions of nature that properly belonged to the climate, man
and the domestic animals excepted. The few Indians that roamed
its forests then could produce no visible effects on the abundance
of the game; and the scattered garrisons, or occasional hunters,
that here and there were to be met with on that vast surface, had
no other influence than the bee on the buckwheat field, or the
humming-bird on the flower.

The marvels that have descended to our own times, in the way of
tradition, concerning the quantities of beasts, birds, and fishes
that were then to be met with, on the shores of the great lakes in
particular, are known to be sustained by the experience of living
men, else might we hesitate about relating them; but having been
eye-witnesses of some of these prodigies, our office shall be
discharged with the confidence that certainty can impart. Oswego
was particularly well placed to keep the larder of an epicure
amply supplied. Fish of various sorts abounded in its river, and
the sportsman had only to cast his line to haul in a bass or some
other member of the finny tribe, which then peopled the waters, as
the air above the swamps of this fruitful latitude are known to be
filled with insects. Among others was the salmon of the lakes, a
variety of that well-known species, that is scarcely inferior to
the delicious salmon of northern Europe. Of the different migratory
birds that frequent forests and waters, there was the same affluence,
hundreds of acres of geese and ducks being often seen at a time in
the great bays that indent the shores of the lake. Deer, bears,
rabbits, and squirrels, with divers other quadrupeds, among which
was sometimes included the elk, or moose, helped to complete the
sum of the natural supplies on which all the posts depended, more
or less, to relieve the unavoidable privations of their remote
frontier positions.

In a place where viands that would elsewhere be deemed great luxuries
were so abundant,