After a hard and painful journey they
arrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a
man and squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired a
sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn from
the conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed to
take them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was a painful one.
Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especial
terror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritan
pulpits. Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where they
compelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the French
planters. Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakes
and mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, was
regarded as an impossibility. The poor boys, terrified by the prospect
of being carried still farther from their home and friends, began to
dream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada.
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