bear. In vain the two Frenchmen offered an extravagant price for the
poor beast; his owners would not part with him. Then they resolved
{215} to "catch him cunningly." So Radisson watches his opportunity,
prowling at night near the visitors' cabin, and when the dog comes out,
snatches him up, stabs him, and carries him to his party, where he is
immediately cut up and "broyled like a pigge." Even the snow soaked
with his blood goes into the kettles.

Radisson's description of the horrors of that fearful time will not
fail to remind readers of Hiawatha of the poet Longfellow's picture of
a famine in the same region in which Radisson was. The main features
are the same. There is the bitter cold,

O the long and dreary winter!
O the cold and cruel winter!

There is the gloomy, snow-laden forest,

Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
Fell the snow o'er all the landscape,
Fell the covering snow, and drifted
Through the forest, round the village.

There are the pitiful cries of the helpless, starving ones,

O the wailing of the children!
O the anguish of the women!

There is the hunter engaged in his bootless quest, {216}

Vainly walked he through the forest,
Sought for bird or beast and found none,
Saw no track of deer or rabbit,
In the snow beheld no footprints.

Then came the two dread visitors, Famine and Fever, and fixed their
awful gaze on Minnehaha, who

Lay there trembling, freezing, burning
At the looks they cast upon her,
At the fearful words they uttered.

Out into the forest rushes Hiawatha, crying frantically to Heaven,

"Give me food for Minnehaha,
For my dying Minnehaha!"
Through the far-resounding forest,
Through the forest vast and vacant
Rang the cry of desolation,
But there came no other answer
Than the echo of the woodlands,
"Minnehaha! Minnehaha!"

All the day he roamed the gloomy depths of the wintry woods, still
vainly seeking food. When he came home empty-handed, heavy-hearted,
lo! the spirit of Minnehaha had fled to the Islands of the Blessed.
Her body they laid in the snow,

In the forest deep and darksome,
Underneath the moaning hemlocks.

{217}

The singularly vivid descriptions of Indian life, with its alternations
of human affection and fiendish cruelty, of daring and cowardice, of
gorging and starving, make one of the most interesting features of
Radisson's book. He lived the life himself and left such a picture of