In the Valley | Page 2

during the many years which have come and gone
since the eventful time of my childhood, Memory has played tricks
upon me to the prejudice of Truth. I am indeed admonished of this by
study of my son, for whose children in turn this tale is indited, and who
is now able to remember many incidents of his youth--chiefly beatings
and like parental cruelties--which I know very well never happened at
all. He is good enough to forgive me these mythical stripes and
bufferings, but he nurses their memory with ostentatious and
increasingly succinct recollection, whereas for my own part, and for his
mother's, our enduring fear was lest we had spoiled him through weak
fondness. By good fortune the reverse has been true. He is grown into a
man of whom any parents might be proud--tall, well-featured, strong,
tolerably learned, honorable, and of influence among his fellows. His
affection for us, too, is very great. Yet in the fashion of this new
generation, which speaks without waiting to be addressed, and does not
scruple to instruct on all subjects its elders, he will have it that he
feared me when a lad--and with cause! If fancy can so distort
impressions within such short span, it does not become me to be too set
about events which come back slowly through the mist and darkness of
nearly threescore years.
Yet they return to me so full of color, and cut in such precision and
keenness of outline, that at no point can I bring myself to say, "Perhaps
I am in error concerning this," or to ask, "Has this perchance been

confused with other matters?" Moreover, there are few now remaining
who of their own memory could controvert or correct me. And if they
essay to do so, why should not my word be at least as weighty as theirs?
And so to the story:
* * * * *
I was in my eighth year, and there was snow on the ground.
The day is recorded in history as November 13, A.D. 1757, but I am
afraid that I did not know much about years then, and certainly the
month seems now to have been one of midwinter. The Mohawk, a
larger stream then by far than in these days, was not yet frozen over,
but its frothy flood ran very dark and chill between the white banks,
and the muskrats and the beavers were all snug in their winter holes.
Although no big fragments of ice floated on the current, there had
already been a prodigious scattering of the bateaux and canoes which
through all the open season made a thriving thoroughfare of the river.
This meant that the trading was over, and that the trappers and hunters,
white and red, were either getting ready to go or had gone northward
into the wilderness, where might be had during the winter the skins of
dangerous animals--bears, wolves, catamounts, and lynx--and where
moose and deer could be chased and yarded over the crust, not to refer
to smaller furred beasts to be taken in traps.
I was not at all saddened by the departure of these rude, foul men, of
whom those of Caucasian race were not always the least savage, for
they did not fail to lay hands upon traps or nets left by the heedless
within their reach, and even were not beyond making off with our boats,
cursing and beating children who came unprotected in their path, and
putting the women in terror of their very lives. The cold weather was
welcome not only for clearing us of these pests, but for driving off the
black flies, mosquitoes, and gnats which at that time, with the great
forests so close behind us, often rendered existence a burden,
particularly just after rains.
Other changes were less grateful to the mind. It was true I would no
longer be held near the house by the task of keeping alight the smoking
kettles of dried fungus, designed to ward off the insects, but at the same
time had disappeared many of the enticements which in summer oft
made this duty irksome. The partridges were almost the sole birds
remaining in the bleak woods, and, much as their curious ways of

hiding in the snow, and the resounding thunder of their strange
drumming, mystified and attracted me, I was not alert enough to catch
them. All my devices of horse-hair and deer-hide snares were
foolishness in their sharp eyes. The water-fowl, too--the geese, ducks,
cranes, pokes, fish-hawks, and others--had flown, sometimes darkening
the sky over our clearing by the density of their flocks, and filling the
air with clamor. The owls, indeed, remained, but I hated them.
The very night before the day of which I speak, I was awakened by one