Different routes were taken by the predatory bands in their descents upon the frontiers of New England. One was by the St. Francis River and Lake Memphremagog, thence to the Passumpsic, and down that river to the Connecticut, that gave an easy route to the settlements. Another was up the Winooski and down White River to the Connecticut. Another left Lake Champlain at the mouth of Great Otter Creek; then up its slow lower reaches to where it becomes a swift mountain stream, when the trail led to West River, or Wantasticook, emptying into the Connecticut. And still another way to West River and the Connecticut was from the head of the lake up the Pawlet River. Of these routes, that by the Winooski was so frequently taken that the English named the stream the French River; while that of which Otter Creek was a part, being the easiest and the nearest to Crown Point, was perhaps the oftenest used, and was commonly known as the "Indian Road." All these familiar warpaths to every Waubanakee warrior, with every stream and landmark bearing names his fathers had given them, led through Vermont, then only known to English-speaking men as "The Wilderness." The treaty of peace between England and France in 1697 gave the colonists a brief respite, till in 1702 war was again declared, and in the summer of the next year five hundred French and Indians assaulted in detachments the settlers on Casco Bay, and that part of the New England coast. In the following winter a force of three hundred French and Indians commanded by Hertel De Rouville, a skilled partisan leader, as had been his father, was dispatched by Vaudreuil, the governor of Canada, against Deerfield, then the northernmost settlement on the Connecticut. It was February, and Champlain was frozen throughout its length. Along it they marched as far as the mouth of the Winooski, and took this their accustomed path through the heart of the wilderness toward the Connecticut. Marching above the unseen and unheard flow of the river, over whose wintry silence bent the snow-laden branches of the graceful birch, the dark hemlock, and the fir, or along the hidden trail, an even whiteness except to the trained instinct of the Indian, seldom a sound came to them out of the forest save the echo of their own footsteps and voices. Sometimes they heard the resonant crack of trees under stress of frost, or the breaking of an over-laden bough, the whir of startled grouse, the sudden retreat of a deer or a giant moose tearing through the undergrowth; and sometimes they heard the stealthy tread of their brothers, the wolves, sneaking from some point of observation near their path, but in this remoteness from human haunts, and this deadness of winter, never a sound to alarm men so accustomed to all strange woodland noises. Then they came to the broad Connecticut, an open road to lead them to their victims, upon whom they fell in the early morning when the guards were asleep. Winter, the frequent ally of