Mountain cavern by the Huron village is a natural refuge adapted into a secure, multi-purpose space within the Huron settlement. Its stone passages and partitioned chambers shelter the community’s valuables and a seriously ill woman, while its concealed entrance allows Duncan Heyward and Hawkeye to reach Alice Munro and attempt an escape. The cavern’s protection is therefore double-edged: it conceals people and property, but its confined passages also make movement difficult and its rooms vulnerable to discovery.

Setting and Structure

The cavern lies within a chasm in the mountain and is reached through a long, straight gallery. A slight bark covering serves as an entrance; beyond it, a large rock cavity has been divided into several simple but ingenious apartments using stone, sticks, and bark. Openings overhead admit daylight, while fires and torches provide light after dark. The route’s narrowness shapes the action: Duncan follows his guide through the passage, with little opportunity to retreat when a bear blocks the way behind him.

Uses within the Huron Settlement

The Hurons have brought most of their valuables into the cavern, especially objects connected with the community. The space also serves as a storehouse for the products of the hunt. Its protected interior is used to accommodate a sick woman whom the Hurons believe to be suffering from supernatural influence; they have moved her there because they think stone walls will make it harder for her tormentor to reach her than the leafy coverings of ordinary dwellings.

Rescue and Exposure

Duncan enters the cavern while disguised as a healer, accompanied by a guide, and discovers David Gamut among the women attending the sick woman. A separate apartment within the cavern holds Alice, the daughter of the commandant of William Henry, amid property plundered from the fort. Hawkeye and Duncan carry her out through the natural gallery. To pass the people gathered at the entrance without revealing themselves, Hawkeye acts as a bear, while Duncan is instructed to claim that they are taking the woman into the woods to find strengthening roots.

Discovery and Significance

The cavern’s apparent security does not prevent suspicion from gathering around the deception. A selected group of Huron chiefs enters to investigate the conflicting accounts of the sick woman’s removal. Inside, they find her still in her usual place, and the father discovers that she has died. The episode turns the cavern from a concealed refuge into the site where the escape is exposed and the family’s loss becomes undeniable. Its rooms bring together the settlement’s valuables, illness, captivity, rescue, and grief, making the mountain shelter a practical instrument of concealment whose protection cannot contain every consequence of the conflict.