reat warrior--good hunting man-Indian no can
kill," and they told him they had tried to find out the secret of his
fire, and catch him off his guard so that they could get his scalp,
which they felt would have been the highest distinction they could have
achieved, next to getting General Wayne's scalp. He was indeed both
hunted and hunter. He never fired at a deer without first putting a
bullet in his mouth to reload for an Indian, who might be about to fire
on him. When he skinned a deer, he planted his back against a tree, and
stood his rifle by his side; from time to time he stopped and
listened for the slightest noise that hinted danger. His life had its
disappointments as well as its perils. Once he saw three Indians whom he
might easily have killed at one shot if he could have got them in range,
but they persisted in walking Indian file. If he fired and killed only
one, the other two would have killed him; so he was obliged to let them
all go. Captain Hunt was a quiet, modest man, very frank and sincere,
and seems never to have boasted of his exploits; we have no means of
knowing whether he was glad or sorry that those Indians got away in
safety. Probably he was not very glad; for though the fighters on both
sides could admire, they could never spare one another.

The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of
Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit
had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a
number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians
from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that
the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be
better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look
out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard
with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge
against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted
there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at
a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river
narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As
he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the
leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and
pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had
now no hope of taking him alive, a