For the silvery river-trout lying there carried a forked willow-twig between gill and gill-cover.

Nor was this all; the fish was fresh-caught, for the gills had not puffed out, nor the supple body stiffened.

Every little wavelet rippled its slim and limber length; and a thread of blood trailed from the throat-latch out over the surface of the water.
Suddenly the young Oneida in mid-stream shrank aside, flattening his yellow painted body against a boulder, and almost at the same instant a rifle spoke.
I heard the bullet smack against the boulder; then the Mohican leaped past me.

For an instant the ford boiled under the silent rush of the Oneidas, the Stockbridge Indian, and the Mohican; then they were across; and I saw the willows sway and toss where they were chasing something human that bounded away through the thicket.

I could even mark, without seeing a living soul, where they caught it and where it was fighting madly but in utter silence while they were doing it to death--so eloquent were the feathery willow-tops of the tragedy that agitated each separate slender stem to frenzy.
Suddenly I turned and looked at the Wyandotte, squatting motionless beside me.