With Wolfe in Canada: The Winning of a Continent

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Excerpt: ...the same height, did not need to do so." "Thank you," James said. "I understand now, and will bear it in mind. It is very interesting, and I should like, above all things, to be able to read the signs of the woods as you do." "It will come, lad. It\'s a sort of second nature. These things are gifts. The redskin thinks it just as wonderful that the white man should be able to take up a piece of paper covered with black marks, and to read off sense out of them, as you do that he should be able to read every mark and sign of the wood. He can see, as plain as if the man was still standing on it, the mark of a footprint, and can tell you if it was made by a warrior or a squaw, and how long they have passed by, and whether they were walking fast or slow; while the ordinary white man might go down on his hands and knees, and stare at the ground, and wouldn\'t be able to see the slightest sign or mark. For a white man, my eyes are good, but they are not a patch on a redskin\'s. I have lived among the woods since I was a boy; but even now, a redskin lad can pick up a trail and follow it when, look as I will, I can\'t see as a blade of grass has been bruised. No; these things is partly natur and partly practice. Practice will do a lot for a white man; but it won\'t take him up to redskin natur." Not until night had fallen did the party again launch their canoes on the lake. Then they paddled for several hours until, as James imagined, they had traversed a greater distance, by some miles, than that which they had made on the previous evening. He knew, from what he had learned during the day, that they were to land some six miles below the point where Lake George joins Lake Champlain, and where, on the opposite side, on a promontory stretching into the lake, the French were constructing their new fort. The canoes were to be carried some seven or eight miles through the wood, across the neck of land between the two lakes, and were then to be launched again on Lake...