where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the
air. The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the
north, shallow. The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks
could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands. The young
prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and
heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers.
Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon! Chagon!--Be merry!
Cheer up!" The fourth day up the Richelieu, he was embarked without
being fastened to the cross-bar, and he was given a paddle. Fresh to
the work, Radisson made a labor of his oar. The Iroquois took the
paddle and taught him how to give the light, deft, feather strokes of
the Indian canoeman. On the river they met another band of warriors,
and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and
to sing songs for his captors. That evening the united bands kindled
an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from
spear heads danced the scalp dance, reënacting in pantomime all the
episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative
relating the foray. At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was
shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave.
Having translated the white man into a savage, they brought him one of
the tin looking-glasses used by Indians to signal in the sun. "I,
viewing myself all in a pickle," relates Radisson, "smeared with red
and black, covered with such a top, . . . could not but fall in love
with myself, if I had not had better instructions to shun the sin of
pride."

Radisson saw that apparent compliance with the Mohawks might win him a
chance to escape; so he was the first to arise in the morning, wakening
the others and urging them that it was time to break camp. The stolid
Indians were not to be moved by an audacious white boy. Watching the