OF WILD FOWL AND HUNTED GAME.

§ 25. As in summer, the rivers and creeks are filled with fish, so in winter they are in many places covered with fowl. There are such a multitude of swans, geese, brants, sheldrakes, ducks of several sorts, mallard, teal, blewings, and many other kinds of water fowl, that the plenty of them is incredible. I am but a small sportsman, yet with a fowling piece have killed above twenty of them at a shot. In like manner are the mill ponds and great runs in the woods stored with these wild fowl at certain seasons of the year.

§ 26. The shores, marshy grounds, swamps and savannahs are also stored with the like plenty of other game of all sorts, as cranes, curlews, herons, snipes, woodcocks, saurers, ox-eyes, plovers, larks, and many other good birds for the table that they have not yet found a name for. Not to mention beavers, otters, musk rats, minxes, and an infinite number of other wild creatures.

§ 27. Although the inner lands want these benefits, (which, however, no pond or plash is without,) yet even they have the advantage of wild turkeys, of an incredible bigness, pheasants, partridges, pigeons, and an infinity of small birds, as well as deer, hares, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, opossums. And upon the frontier plantations, they meet with bears, panthers, wild cats, elks, buffaloes and wild hogs, which yield pleasure as well as profit to the sportsman. And though some of these names may seem frightful to the English, who hear not of them in their own country, yet they are not so there, for all these creatures ever fly from the face of man, doing no damage but to the cattle and hogs, which the Indians never troubled themselves about.

Here I cannot omit a strange rarity in the female opossum, which I myself have seen. They have a false belly, or loose skin quite over the belly; this never sticks to the flesh of the belly, but may be looked into at all times, after they have been concerned in procreation. In the hinderpart of this is an aperture big enough for a small hand to pass into: hither the young ones, after they are full haired, and strong enough to run about, do fly whenever any danger appears, or when they go to rest or suck. This they continue till they have learned to live without the dam: but what is yet stranger, the young ones are bred in this false belly without ever being within the true one. They are formed at the teat, and there they grow for several weeks together into perfect shape, becoming visibly larger, till at last they get strength, sight and hair; and then they drop off and rest in this false belly, going in and out at pleasure. I have observed them thus fastened at the teat from the bigness of a fly until they become as large as a mouse. Neither is it any hurt to the old one to open this budget and look in upon her young.

§ 28. The Indians had no other way of taking their water or land fowl, but by the help of bows and arrows. Yet so great was their plenty, that with this weapon only they killed what numbers they pleased. And when the water fowl kept far from shore (as in warmer weather they sometimes did) they took their canoes and paddled after them.

But they had a better way of killing the elks, buffaloes, deer, and greater game, by a method which we call fire hunting: that is, a company of them would go together back into the woods any time in the winter, when the leaves were falling and so dry that they would burn; and being come to the place designed, they would fire the woods in a circle of five or six miles compass; and when they had completed the first round they retreated inward, each at his due distance, and put fire to the leaves and grass afresh, to accelerate the work, which ought to be finished with the day. This they repeat till the circle be so contracted that they can see their game herded all together in the middle, panting and almost stifled with heat and smoke; for the poor creatures being frightened at the flame keep running continually round, thinking to run from it, and dare not pass through the fire; by which means they are brought at last into a very narrow compass. Then the Indians retreat into the centre, and let fly their arrows at them as they pass round within the circle; by this means, though they stand often quite clouded in smoke, they rarely shoot each other. By this means they destroy all the beasts collected within that circle. They make all this slaughter chiefly for the sake of the skins, leaving most of the carcasses to perish in the woods.

Father Verbiast, in his description of the Emperor of China's voyage into the Eastern Tartary, Anno 1682, gives an account of a way of hunting the Tartars have, not much unlike this; only whereas the Indians surround their game with fire, the Tartars do it with a great body of armed men, who having environed the ground they design to drive, march equally inwards, which, still as the ring lessens, brings the men nearer each other, till at length the wild beasts are encompassed with a living wall.

The Indians have many pretty inventions to discover and come up to the deer, turkeys and other game undiscerned; but that being an art known to very few English there, I will not be so accessary to the destruction of their game as to make it public. I shall therefore only tell you, that when they go a hunting into the outlands, they commonly go out for the whole season with their wives and family. At the place where they find the most game they build up a convenient number of small cabins, wherein they live during that season. These cabins are both begun and finished in two or three days, and after the season is over they make no farther account of them.§ 29. This, and a great deal more, was the natural production of that country, which the native Indians enjoyed, without the curse of industry, their diversion alone, and not their labor, supplying their necessities. The women and children indeed were so far provident as to lay up some of the nuts and fruits of the earth in their season for their farther occasions: but none of the toils of husbandry were exercised by this happy people, except the bare planting a little corn and melons, which took up only a few days in the summer, the rest being wholly spent in the pursuit of their pleasures. And indeed all that the English have done since their going thither has been only to make some of these native pleasures more scarce, by an inordinate and unseasonable use of them; hardly making improvements equivalent to that damage.

I shall in the next book give an account of the Indians themselves, their religion, laws and customs; that so both the country and its primitive inhabitants may be considered together in that original state of nature in which the English found them. Afterwards I will treat of the present state of the English there, and the alterations, I can't call them improvements, they have made at this day.

BOOK III.

OF THE INDIANS, THEIR RELIGION, LAWS AND CUSTOMS, IN WAR AND PEACE.