and sung of the
advantages possessed by the mountaineer when striving in his own home
against invaders from the plains; but these advantages are as nothing
when weighed with those which make the warlike dweller in forests
unconquerable by men who have not his training. A hardy soldier,
accustomed only to war in the open, will become a good cragsman in fewer
weeks than it will take him years to learn to be so much as a fair
woodsman; for it is beyond all comparison more difficult to attain
proficiency in woodcraft than in mountaineering.[13]

The Wyandots, and the Algonquins who surrounded them, dwelt in a region
of sunless, tangled forests; and all the wars we waged for the
possession of the country between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi
were carried on in the never-ending stretches of gloomy woodland. It was
not an open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and rank, between the
boles of the tall trees, making a cover so thick that it was in many
places impenetrable, so thick that it nowhere gave a chance for human
eye to see even as far as a bow could carry. No horse could penetrate it
save by following the game trails or paths chopped with the axe; and a
stranger venturing a hundred yards from a beaten road would be so
helplessly lost that he could not, except by the merest chance, even
find his way back to the spot he had just left. Here and there it was
broken by a rare hillside glade or by a meadow in a stream valley; but
elsewhere a man might travel for weeks as if in a perpetual twilight,
never once able to see the sun, through the interlacing twigs that
formed a dark canopy above his head.

This dense forest was to the Indians a home in which they had lived from
childhood, and where they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own
acres. To their keen eyes, trained for generations to more than a wild
beast's watchfulness, the wilderness was an open book; nothing at rest
or in motion escaped them. They had begun to track game as soon as they
could walk; a scrape on a tree trunk, a bruised leaf, a faint
indentation of the soil, which the eye of no white man could see, all
told them a tale as plainly as if it had been shouted in their ears.[14]
With moccasined feet they trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and
dead branches as silently as the cougar, and they equalled the great
wood-cat in stealth and far surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They
could no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a ci