The report
of a distant gun would perhaps be heard from the solitary
woodland, where there was known to be no white man; the cattle
which had been wandering in the woods would sometimes return home
wounded; or an Indian or two would be seen lurking about the
skirts of the forests and suddenly disappearing, as the lightning
will sometimes be seen playing silently about the edge of the
cloud that is brewing up the tempest.
Though sometimes pursued and even surrounded by the settlers, yet
Philip as often escaped almost miraculously from their toils,
and, plunging into the wilderness, would be lost to all search or
inquiry until he again emerged at some far distant quarter,
laying the country desolate. Among his strongholds were the great
swamps or morasses which extend in some parts of New England,
composed of loose bogs of deep black mud, perplexed with
thickets, brambles, rank weeds, the shattered and mouldering
trunks of fallen trees, overshadowed by lugubrious hemlocks. The
uncertain footing and the tangled mazes of these shaggy wilds
rendered them almost impracticable to the white man, though the
Indian could thread their labyrinths with the agility of a deer.
Into one of these, the great swamp of Pocasset Neck, was Philip
once driven with a band of his followers.
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