f Aboriginal Knowledge_,
Philadelphia, 1860, 6 vols. 4to, vol. i. p. 89; a figure of
this weapon is given in the same volume, plate xv. fig. 2, from
a careful description by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief.]

[Sidenote: The uniped.]

The coexistence of so many unmistakable marks of truth in our narratives
may fairly be said to amount to a demonstration that they must be
derived, through some eminently trustworthy channel, from the statements
of intelligent eye-witnesses who took part in the events related. Here
and there, no doubt, we come upon some improbable incident or a touch of
superstition, such as we need not go back to the eleventh century to
find very common among seamen's narratives; but the remarkable thing in
the present case is that there are so few such features. One fabulous
creature is mentioned. Thorfinn and his men saw from their vessel a
glittering speck upon the shore at an opening in the woods. They hailed
it, whereupon the creature proceeded to perform the quite human act of
shooting an arrow, which killed the man at the helm. The narrator calls
it a "uniped," or some sort of one-footed goblin,[232] but that is
hardly reasonable, for after the shooting it went on to perform the
further quite human and eminently Indian-like act of running away.[233]
Evidently this discreet "uniped" was impressed with the desirableness of
living to fight another day. In a narrative otherwise characterized by
sobriety, such an instance of fancy, even supposing it to have come down
from the original sources, counts for as much or as little as Henry
Hudson's description of a mermaid.[234]

[Footnote 232: Rafn, p. 160; De Costa, p. 134; Storm, p. 330.]

[Footnote 233: Here the narrator seems determined to give us a
genuine smack of the marvellous, for when the fleeing uniped
comes to a place where his retreat seems cut off by an arm of
the sea, he runs (glides, or hops?) across the water without
sinking. In Vigfusson's version, however, the marvellous is
eliminated, and the creature simply runs over the stubble and
disappears. The incident is evidently an instance where the
narrative has been "embellished" by introducing a feature from
ancient classical writers. The "Monocoli," or one-legged
people, are mentioned by Pliny, _Hist. Nat._, vii. 2: "Item
hominum genus qui Monocoli vocarentur