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"Guided by no very extraordinary experience, I knew that where there was snow there must be water; and, without another word, I directed Cudjo to head his oxen for the mountain. It was out of the way we wanted to go; but we thought not of that, for the saving of our lives had now come to be the only question with us. "The mountain was still twenty miles distant.
We had not been watching our floats more than five minutes, when we noticed, here and there, a slight stir in the water; and, in the midst of the little circles thus made, we could see small black objects not unlike the heads of snakes. At first we took them for these. Cudjo, however, knew better than we what they were, for he had often seen them while fishing in the creeks of Virginia.
"I did not hesitate a moment after forming this resolve; but, handing my empty rifle to Frank, and drawing my knife, I dropped down among the smoking heaps of half-burnt moss. I ran off the moment my feet touched the ground; and, after going a distance of an hundred yards or so, I came in sight of the dogs, and the next moment of Harry and Cudjo.
Telling Cudjo to take his axe and follow me, I climbed out at the back window of our cabin; and keeping the house between us and the horses, we crept along past our store-house and stable, until we got into the woods in the rear. We skirted through the timber, and soon reached the point where the road runs out of the valley.
What was strange to us, they did not gallop, as most deer do, but went off in a sort of shambling trot, like a `pacing' horse, and quite as fast as a horse could gallop. "The dogs which, up to this time, Cudjo had been holding by their necks dashed after with yelps and barking.
"On the third day, Cudjo notched the logs, and on the fourth we raised the walls up to the square. On the fifth, we set up the gables and rafters, which, you know, is done by shortening the gable-logs successively, as you go upward, and tying each pair of them by a pair of rafters notched into them, at the ends, precisely as the wall-logs below.
"While Cudjo and the boys were engaged in putting them into the park, all at once I remembered what I had read of, but which had hitherto escaped my memory that the great American elk is capable of being trained as a beast either of draught or burden. "I need hardly tell you, my friends, that this thought at once led to a series of reflections.
They would have been fools, indeed, to have made that dreadful journey for all they could have gotten from us. Moreover, the sight of our antelope, with its nice yellow fat, crisped by the cold night-air, was anything but disheartening. As Cudjo was a dexterous butcher, I allowed him to quarter it, while I shouldered the axe and marched off to the mountain-foot to procure more wood for the fire.
"`Neber mind, said Cudjo, `so much de better two bee-tree better than one. "Cudjo marked the direction which the latter had taken, precisely as he had done with the other. "Without changing the log a third bee was caught and `put through. This one took a new route, different from either of his predecessors. "`Gollies! Massa! cried Cudjo, `dis valley am full ob honey.
But Cudjo and I were determined, as soon as we should have finished our building operations, to lend them a hand in laying in their stock of provisions."
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