ite men obtained enough game to sustain them till they reached the
fort on the 11th of December.

[Illustration: Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle.]

The question now was whether to wait till spring or set out in the
teeth of midwinter. If Hearne left the fort in spring, he could not
possibly reach the Arctic Circle till the following winter; and with
the North buried under drifts of snow, he could not learn where lay the
Northwest Passage. If he left the fort in winter in order to reach the
Arctic in summer, he must expose his guides to the risks of cold and
starvation. The Indians told of high, rocky barrens, across which no
canoes could be carried. They advised snow-shoe travel. Obtaining
three Chipewyans and two Crees as guides, and taking no white servants,
Hearne once more set out, on February 23, 1770, for the "Far-Away-Metal
River." This time there was no cannonading. The guns were buried
under snow-drifts twenty feet deep, and the snow-shoes of the
travellers glided over the fort walls to the echoing cheers of soldiers
and governor standing on the ramparts. The company travelled light,
depending on chance game for food. All wood that could be used for
fire lay hidden deep under snow. At wide intervals over the white
wastes mushroom cones of snow told where a stunted tree projected the
antlered branches of topmost bough through the depths of drift; but for
the most part camp was made by digging through the shallowest snow with
snow-shoes to the bottom of moss, which served the double purpose of
fuel for the night kettle and bed for travellers. In the hollow a
wigwam was erected, with the door to the south, away from the north
wind. Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food. The way lay as
before--west-northwest--along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers
connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean. By April the marchers
were on the margin of a desolate wilderness--the Indian region of
"Little Sticks,"--known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf
trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts
on the far offing of a lonely sea. Game became scarcer. Neither the
round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern
grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white. Caribou had
retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter
than man had scoured the wide wastes of game. Only the wolf pack
roamed the Barren Lands. It was unsafe