Besides, his honor was
pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to
have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec. Perhaps, too, there
was deep in his heart what he did not realize--a rooted love for the
wilds that was to follow him all through life. By the devious course
of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.
He declined the offer of the Dutch. In two days he was back among the
Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been. Mother and
sisters were his slaves.
But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide
difference. He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of
crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French
home in Three Rivers. The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties
of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing. The nature of the white man,
which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage--and in
danger of total eclipse--now came upper-most. With Radisson, to think
was to act. He determined to escape if it cost him his life.
Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left
the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653. Once out of
sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail
through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange. On
and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without
backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas
of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that
guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould
worn by running warriors.
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