CHAPTER X.
"Scared by the red and noisy light."-- COLERIDGE.
Hector and Louis had now little employment, excepting chopping fire-wood, which was no very arduous task for two stout healthy lads, used from childhood to handling the axe.

Trapping, and hunting, and snaring hares, were occupations which they pursued more for the excitement and exercise than from hunger, as they had laid by abundance of dried, venison, fish, and birds, besides a plentiful store of rice.
They now visited those trees that they had marked in the summer, where they had noticed the bees hiving, and cut them down; in one they got more than a pailful of rich honey-comb, and others yielded some more, some less; this afforded them a delicious addition to their boiled rice, and dried acid fruits.

They might have melted the wax, and burned candles of it; but this was a refinement of luxury that never once occurred to our young house-keepers: the dry pine knots that are found in the woods are the settlers' candles; but Catharine made some very good vinegar with the refuse of the honey and combs, by pouring water on it, and leaving it to ferment in a warm nook of the chimney, in one of the birch-bark vessels, and this was an excellent substitute for salt as a seasoning to the fresh meat and fish.

Like the Indians, they were now reconciled to the want of this seasonable article.
Indiana seemed to enjoy the cold weather; the lake, though locked up to every one else, was open to her; with the aid of the tomahawk she patiently made an opening in the ice, and over this she built a little shelter of pine boughs stuck into the ice.

Armed with a sharp spear carved out of hardened wood, she would lie upon the ice and patiently await the rising of some large fish to the air-hole, when dexterously plunging it into the unwary creature, she dragged it to the surface.
Many a noble fish did the young squaw bring home, and lay at the feet of him whom she had tacitly elected as her lord and master; to him she offered the voluntary service of a faithful and devoted servant--I might almost have said, slave.
During the middle of December there were some days of such intense cold, that even our young Crusoes, hardy as they were, preferred the blazing log-fire and warm ingle nook, to the frozen lake and cutting north-west wind which blew the loose snow in blinding drifts over its bleak, unsheltered surface.