bear to
look. He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a
nightmare. Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide
boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing
down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless
as stone was an old, old woman--probably a witch of the tribe--red-eyed
as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of
all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls. There was a shout
from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;
and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as
insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack. Odd commentary in our
modern philosophies--this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,
weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by
bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to
jostle the Indian from the face of the New World. Something more than
a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a
race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak,
vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.

Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer's exultation.
A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic
Ocean,--the first white man to reach it overland in America. Ice
extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see. Not a
sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow
lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on
the sky of the far horizon. At one in the morning, with the sun
hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession
of the Arctic regions for the Hudson's Bay Company. The same Company
rules those regions to-day. Not an eye had been closed for three days
and nights. Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band
now slept for six hours. The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing
over the mossed rocks. A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.
Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or
the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians
fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]

[Illustration: Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's Drawing,
1733-47.]

The retreat from the Arctic was made with all swiftness, keeping close
to the Coppermine River. For thirty miles from the sea not a tree was
to be seen. Th