The colonel had anticipated a degree of protest, knowing it would be an inevitable consequence of the requirement to put as much distance as possible between the column and its pursuers. And if that meant that some of them had to suffer sore feet and bloody blisters, then so be it. The alternative would be far worse.

Of all of them, it was the children, curiously, who’d proved to be the most adaptable. There were no babes in arms, a fact for which Johnson was exceedingly grateful, and to the dozen or so youngsters who were on the trail – the youngest being eight, the oldest fourteen – it had become a thrilling escapade; keeping pace with the soldiers, listening wide-eyed to their tall stories and their coarse banter, and camping out with them in the woods beneath the stars.

Just as uncomplaining were the Negro servants. Indentured into a life of domestic servitude and therefore no strangers to hardship, they had proved themselves resilient travellers, stoically accepting the rigours of the journey as a price worth paying for their escorted passage north.

The column, now comprising some three hundred troops, nearly two hundred assorted civilians and more than sixty pack animals, stretched for several hundred yards. As he rode the line, the colonel offered another silent prayer to the men who’d carved out the road. Had it not been there, it would have been impossible for the fugitives to have cut their own path through the woods and maintain the pace, though in this part of the state any witnesses to their presence were more likely to be of the four- rather than the two-legged variety. The mountainous hinterland that stretched between the Hudson and the Great Lakes could not be termed virgin territory, as indicated by the trail they were currently following, but, save for the military and fur trappers, few white men had ventured beyond the forest’s eastern rim.

On ancient maps, it was the custom to indicate unexplored regions with representations of winged beasts and the inscription Here be dragons. There were no such drawings on the maps of the north-eastern states currently in circulation. The cartographers had made do with a one-word inscription: Couxsachrage. An ancient Indian word; to some, it translated as the Habitation of Winter. To others, the Dismal Wilderness. But these definitions were the white man’s interpretation. To the tribes of the Six Nations there was but one name, one meaning:

The Hunting Grounds.