They split open any of the birds that they did not require for present consumption, and these they dried for winter store, smoking some after the manner that the Shetlanders and Orkney people smoke the solan geese: their shanty displayed an abundant store of provisions, fish, flesh, and fowl, besides baskets of wild rice, and bags of dried fruit.
One day Indiana came in from the brow of the hill, and told the boys that the lake eastward was covered with canoes; she showed, by holding up her two hands and then three fingers, that she had counted thirteen.
The tribes had met for the annual duck-feast, and for the rice harvest.
She advised them to put out the fire, so that no smoke might be seen to attract them; but said they would not leave the lake for hunting over the plains just then, as the camp was lower down on the point _[FN: This point, commonly known as _Anderson's Point_, now the seat of the Indian village, used in former times to be a great place of rendezvous for the Indians, and was the site of a murderous carnage or massacre that took place about eighty years ago; the war-weapons and bones of the Indians are often turned up with the plough at this day.]_ east of the mouth of a big river, which she called "Otonabee." Hector asked Indiana if she would go away and leave them, in the event of meeting with any of her own tribe.

The girl cast her eyes on the earth in silence; a dark cloud seemed to gather over her face.
"If they should prove to be any of your father's people, or a friendly tribe, would you go away with them ?" he again repeated, to which she solemnly replied, "Indiana has no father, no tribe, no people; no blood of her father's warms the heart of any man, woman or child, saving myself alone; but Indiana is a brave, and the daughter of a brave, and will not shrink from danger: her heart is warm; red blood flows warm here," and she laid her hand on her heart.

Then lifting up her hand, she said with slow but impassioned tone, "They left not one drop of living blood to flow in any veins but these," and her eyes were raised, and her arms stretched upwards towards heaven, as though calling down vengeance on the murderers of her father's house.
"My father was a Mohawk, the son of a great chief, who owned these hunting-grounds far as your eye can see to the rising and setting sun, along the big waters of the big lakes; but the Ojebwas, a portion of the Chippewa nation, by treachery cut off my father's people by hundreds in cold blood, when they were defenceless and at rest.

It was a bloody day and a bloody deed." Instead of hiding herself, as Hector and Louis strongly advised the young Mohawk to do, she preferred remaining as a scout, she said, under the cover of the bushes on the edge of the steep that overlooked the lake, to watch their movements.

She told Hector to be under no apprehension if the Indians came to the hut; not to attempt to conceal themselves, but offer them food to eat and water to drink.