``A devil draw the teeth of him,'' said Gurth, ``and the mother of mischief confound the
Ranger of the forest, that cuts the foreclaws off our dogs, and makes them unfit for their trade!* Wamba, up and help me an thou
Hark ye, since you are a
Ranger, I must e'en demand your service.
No wonder that a man should grow restless under such an inspection as this, to say nothing of the eyes belonging to short Tom Cobb the general chandler and post-office keeper, and long Phil Parkes the
ranger, both of whom, infected by the example of their companions, regarded him of the flapped hat no less attentively.
It was bought by my late husband, Captain Adolphus
Ranger March, who had another residence, The Crest, Appleby.
"`Nobody axed me, sir, she said' -- at least, nobody but that horrid little Dan
Ranger. I wouldn't go anywhere with him; but rather than hurt his poor little tender feelings I said I wasn't going to the game at all.
These were called coureurs des bois,
rangers of the woods; originally men who had accompanied the Indians in their hunting expeditions, and made themselves acquainted with remote tracts and tribes; and who now became, as it were, peddlers of the wilderness.
"She set to work and organized the Sixteen, and called it the First Battalion Rocky Mountain
Rangers, U.S.A., and she wanted to be bugler, but they elected her Lieutenant-General and Bugler.
Besides all this, he dearly loved the longbow, and a sly jaunt in the forest when the moon was full and the dun deer in season; so that the King's
rangers kept a shrewd eye upon him and his doings, for Arthur a Bland's house was apt to have aplenty of meat in it that was more like venison than the law allowed.
Such is the account given by Captain Bonneville of these
rangers of the wilderness, and their appearance at the camp was strikingly characteristic.
They might well have been considered winged sharks, so striking was their resemblance to those ferocious
rangers of the deep.
The only man who would undertake to raid them was a certain excellent seer, {95} but the will of heaven was against him, for the
rangers of the cattle caught him and put him in prison; nevertheless when a full year had passed and the same season came round again, Iphicles set him at liberty, after he had expounded all the oracles of heaven.
When I went with Sir William agin’ the French, at Fort Niagara, all the
rangers used the rifle; and a dreadful weapon it is, in the hands of one who knows how to charge it, and keep a steady aim.