The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had
been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in
the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France. It was from
Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could
outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes
back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was
really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,
coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the
Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the
laggards.[1] It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured
the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound
her. Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a
fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the
nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow
tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.
[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]
These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers. Farmers
had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields
only when armed with a musket.[2] Yet the three young hunters rashly
left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path
that led between the forests and the water. One of the young men was
barely in his seventeenth year.[3] This was Pierre Esprit Radisson,
from St.
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