Mid-Winter

[H2O Man]

7. I haven't.

I'm somewhat familiar with it, from friends who have read it. I haven't read any fiction, including historical fiction, in over half a century. I realize that by others' standards, I'm a strange person, rigid about only reading non-fiction and watching news shows and documentaries.

The Adirondacks can be brutal in the winter. That would be even more so in the contact/colonial era, when the "Eastern Door" to the longhouse (Mohawk) did not have good relations to their neighbors to the east, who they called "Adirondacks," meaning "bark eaters," also known as Algonquins.

On my in-laws' large rural farm, there was a site where a very steep bank at the edfge of a field dropped off to a creek. The artifacts found there suggest that the Iroquois chased deer down it, as it would get huge snow drifts that slowed the deer, making them easier targets. It wasn't a settlement so much as a kill site. My in-laws used the same hunting strategy on that land for generations after the Revolutionary War opened it for settlement. (It was a site just off a sixty mile map of former Iroquois & Lenapi sites along the woodland trail that became the Kingston Turnpike.)