There ain't no sech hunter as Jim ever came out of Virginny, no, nor out of Caroliny, neither.

It was him that fust telled me of Kaintuck'.

'The dark and bloody land, the Shawnees calls it,' he says, speakin' in his eddicated way, and dark and bloody it is, but that's man's doing and not the Almighty's.

The land flows with milk and honey, he says, clear water and miles of clover and sweet grass, enough to feed all the herds of Basham, and mighty forests with trees that thick ye could cut a hole in their trunks and drive a waggon through, and sugar-maples and plums and cherries like you won't see in no set orchard, and black soil fair crying for crops.

And the game, Jim says, wasn't to be told about without ye wanted to be called a liar--big black-nosed buffaloes that packed together so the whole placed seemed moving, and elk and deer and bar past counting....