CHAPTER V.
THE HOME OF THE HURON.
Tis nature's worship--felt--confessed, Far as the life which warms the breast! The sturdy savage midst his clan, The rudest portraiture of man, In trackless woods and boundless plains, Where everlasting wildness reigns, Owns the still throb--the secret start-- The hidden impulse of the heart .-- BYRON.
The Huron, after his escape from the Shawnees, quickened his pace, as we have stated, and went many a mile before he changed his long, sidling trot into the less rapid walk.

When he did this, it was upon the shore of a large creek, which ran through one of the wildest and most desolate regions of Ohio.

In some portions the banks were nothing more than a continuous swamp, the creek spreading out like a lake among the reeds and undergrowth, through which glided the enormous water-snake, frightened at the apparition of a man in this lonely spot.
The bright fish darted hither and thither, their sides flashing up in the sunlight like burnished silver.
The agile Indian sprung lightly from one turf of earth to another, now balancing himself on a rotten stump or root, now walking the length of some fallen tree, so decayed and water-eaten that it mashed to a pulp beneath his feet, and then leaping to some other precarious foothold, progressing rapidly all the time and with such skill that he hardly wetted his moccasin.
While treading a log thus, which gave back a hollow sound, the head of an immense rattlesnake protruded from a hole in the tree, its tail giving the deadly alarm, as it continued issuing forth, as if determined to dispute the passage of man in this desolate place.

The fearless Huron scarcely halted.

While picking his way through the swamp he had carried his rifle lightly balanced in his left hand, and he now simply changed it to his right, grasping it by the muzzle, so that the stock was before him.