“Well, well,” cried the youth impatiently, “say no more about it, my good friends; if I am not all that your partiality would make me, I am yours through life, in prosperity as in poverty. We will talk of other matters.”
The old hunters yielded to his wish, which seemed to be their law.
For a short time a profound silence prevailed, during which each man was very busy with his hook and line, but Edwards, probably feeling that it remained with him to renew the discourse, soon observed, with the air of one who knew not what he said: “How beautifully tranquil and glassy the lake is!
Saw you it ever more calm and even than at this moment, Natty?”
“I have known the Otsego water for five-and-forty years,” said Leather—Stocking, “and I will say that for it, which is, that a cleaner spring or better fishing is not to be found in the land.
Yes, yes; I had the place to myself once, and a cheerful time I had of it.
The game was plenty as heart could wish; and there was none to meddle with the ground unless there might have been a hunting party of the Delawares crossing the hills, or, maybe, a rifling scout of them thieves, the Iroquois.
There was one or two Frenchmen that squatted in the flats further west, and married squaws; and some of the Scotch-Irishers, from the Cherry Valley, would come on to the lake, and borrow my canoe to take a mess of parch, or drop a line for salmon-trout; but, in the main, it was a cheerful place, and I had but little to disturb me in it.
John would come, and John knows.”
Mohegan turned his dark face at this appeal; and, moving his hand forward with graceful motion of assent, he spoke, using the Delaware language:
“The land was owned by my people; we gave it to my brother in council—to the Fire-eater; and what the Delawares give lasts as long as the waters run.
Hawk-eye smoked at that council, for we loved him.”
“No, no, John,” said Natty, “I was no chief, seeing that I knowed nothing of scholarship, and had a white skin.
But it was a comfortable hunting-ground then, lad, and would have been so this day, but for the money of Marmaduke Temple, and the twisty ways of the law.”
“It must have been a sight of melancholy pleasure in deed,” said Edwards, while his eye roved along the shores and over the hills, where the clearings, groaning with the golden corn, were cheering the forest with the signs of life, “to have roamed over these mountains and along this sheet of beautiful water, without a living soul to speak to, or to thwart your humor.”
“Haven’t I said it was cheerful?” said Leather-Stocking.
“Yes, yes, when the trees began to be covered with leaves, and the ice was out of the hake, it was a second paradise.
I have travelled the woods for fifty-three years, and have made them my home for more than forty, and I can say that I have met but one place that was more to my liking; and that was only to eyesight, and not for hunting or fishing.”
“And where was that?” asked Edwards.
“Where! why, up on the Catskills.
I used often to go up into the mountains after wolves’ skins and bears; once they paid me to get them a stuffed painter, and so I often went.
There’s a place in them hills that I used to climb to when I wanted to see the carryings on of the world, that would well pay any man for a barked shin or a torn moccasin.
You know the Catskills, lad; for you must have seen them on your left, as you followed the river up from York, looking as blue as a piece of clear sky, and holding the clouds on their tops, as the smoke curls over the head of an Indian chief at the council fire.
Well, there’s the High-peak and the Round-top, which lay back like a father and mother among their children, seeing they are far above all the other hills.
But the place I mean is next to the river, where one of the ridges juts out a little from the rest, and where the rocks fall, for the best part of a thousand feet, so much up and down, that a man standing on their edges is fool enough to think he can jump from top to bottom.”
“What see you when you get there?” asked Edwards,
“Creation,” said Natty, dropping the end of his rod into the water, and sweeping one hand around him in a circle, “all creation, lad.
I was on that hill when Vaughan burned
‘Sopus in the last war; and I saw the vessels come out of the Highlands as plain as I can see that lime-scow rowing into the Susquehanna, though one was twenty times farther from me than the other.
The river was in sight for seventy miles, looking like a curled shaving under my feet, though it was eight long miles to its banks.
I saw the hills in the Hampshire grants, the highlands of the river, and all that God had done, or man could do, far as eye could reach—you know that the Indians named me for my sight, lad; and from the flat on the top of that mountain, I have often found the place where Albany stands. And as for ‘Sopus, the day the royal troops burnt the town, the smoke seemed so nigh, that I thought I could hear the screeches of the women.”
“It must have been worth the toil to meet with such a glorious view.”
“If being the best part of a mile in the air and having men’s farms and houses your feet, with rivers looking like ribbons, and mountains bigger than the ‘Vision seeming to be hay-stacks of green grass under you, gives any satisfaction to a man, I can recommend the spot.
When I first came into the woods to live, I used to have weak spells when I felt lonesome: and then I would go into the Catskills, and spend a few days on that hill to look at the ways of man; but it’s now many a year since I felt any such longings, and I am getting too old for rugged rocks.
But there’s a place, a short two miles back of that very hill, that in late times I relished better than the mountains: for it was more covered with the trees, and natural.”
“And where was that?” inquired Edwards, whose curiosity was strongly excited by the simple description of the hunter.
“Why, there’s a fall in the hills where the water of two little ponds. that lie near each other, breaks out of their bounds and runs over the rocks into the valley.
The stream is, maybe, such a one as would turn a mill, if so useless thing was wanted in the wilderness. But the hand that made that ‘Leap’ never made a mill.
There the water comes crooking and winding among the rocks, first so slow that a trout could swim in it, and then starting and running like a creatur’ that wanted to make a far spring, till it gets to where the mountain divides, like the cleft hoof of a deer, leaving a deep hollow for the brook to tumble into.
The first pitch is nigh two hundred feet, and the water looks like flakes of driven snow afore it touches the bottom; and there the stream gathers itself together again for a new start, and maybe flutters over fifty feet of flat rock before it falls for another hundred, when it jumps about from shelf to shelf, first turning this-away and then turning that-away, striving to get out of the hollow, till it finally comes to the plain.”
“I have never heard of this spot before; it is not mentioned in the books.”
“I never read a book in my life,” said Leather-Stocking; “and how should a man who has lived in towns and schools know anything about the wonders of the woods?
No, no, lad; there has that little stream of water been playing among the hills since He made the world, and not a dozen white men have ever laid eyes on it.
The rock sweeps like mason-work, in a half-round, on both sides of the fall, and shelves over the bottom for fifty feet; so that when I’ve been sitting at the foot of the first pitch, and my hounds have run into the caverns behind the sheet of water, they’ve looked no bigger than so many rabbits.
To my judgment, lad, it’s the best piece of work that I’ve met with in the woods; and none know how often the hand of God is seen in the wilderness, but them that rove it for a man’s life.”
“What becomes of the water?
In which direction does it run?
Is it a tributary of the Delaware?”
“Anan!” said Natty.
“Does the water run into the Delaware?”