Scouts were sent cautiously forward to trail the path of the aliens who had lighted the far moss fire. Women and children were ordered to head about for a rendezvous southwest on Lake Athabasca. Carrying only the lightest supplies, the braves set out swiftly for the North on June 1. Mist and rain hung so heavily over the desolate moors that the travellers could not see twenty feet ahead. In places the rocks were glazed with ice and scored with runnels of water. Half the warriors here lost heart and turned back. The others led by Hearne and Matonabbee crossed the iced precipices on hands and knees, with gun stocks strapped to backs or held in teeth. On the 21st of June the sun did not set. Hearne had crossed the Arctic Circle. The sun hung on the southern horizon all night long. Henceforth the travellers marched without tents. During rain or snow storm, they took refuge under rocks or in caves. Provisions turned mouldy with wet. The moss was too soaked for fire. Snow fell so heavily in drifting storms that Hearne often awakened in the morning to find himself almost immured in the cave where they had sought shelter. Ice lay solid on the lakes in July. Once, clambering up steep, bare heights, the travellers met a herd of a hundred musk-oxen scrambling over the rocks with the agility of squirrels, the spreading, agile hoof giving grip that lifted the hulking forms over all obstacles. Down the bleak, bare heights there poured cataract and mountain torrent, plainly leading to some near river bed; but the thick gray fog lay on the land like a blanket. At last a thunder-storm cleared the air; and Hearne saw bleak moors sloping north, bare of all growth but the trunks of burnt trees, with barren heights of rock and vast, desolate swamps, where the wild-fowl flocked in myriads.
[Illustration: Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago.]
All count of day and night was now lost, for the sun did not set. Sometime between midnight and morning of July 12, 1771, with the sun as bright as noon, the lakes converged to a single river-bed a hundred yards wide, narrowing to a waterfall that roared over the rocks in three cataracts. This, then, was the "Far-Off-Metal River." Plainly, it was a disappointing discovery, this Coppermine River. It did not lead to China. It did not point the way to a Northwest Passage. In his disappointment, Hearne learned what every other discoverer in North America had learned—that the Great Northwest was something more than a bridge between Europe and Asia, that it was a world in itself with its own destiny.[1]
But Hearne had no time to brood over disappointment. The conduct of his rascally companions could no longer be misunderstood. Hunters came in with game; but when the hungry slaves would have lighted a moss fire to cook the meat, the forbidding hand of a chief went up. No fires were to be lighted. The Indians advanced with whispers, dodging from stone to stone like raiders in ambush. Spies went forward on tiptoe. Then far down-stream below the cataracts Hearne descried the domed tent-tops of an Eskimo band sound asleep; for it was midnight, though the sun was at high noon. When Hearne looked back to his companions, he found himself deserted. The Indians were already wading the river for the west bank, where the Eskimo had camped. Hearne overtook his guides stripping themselves of everything that might impede flight or give hand-hold to an enemy, and daubing their skin with war-paint. Hearne begged Matonabbee to restrain the murderous warriors. The great chief smiled with silent contempt. He was too true a disciple of a doctrine which Indians' practised hundreds of years before white men had avowed it—the survival of the fit, the extermination of the weak, for any qualms of pity towards a victim whose death would contribute profit. Wearing only moccasins and bucklers of hardened hide, armed with muskets, lances, and tomahawks, the Indians jostled Hearne out of their way, stole forward from stone to stone to within a gun length of the Eskimo, then with a wild war shout flung themselves on the unsuspecting sleepers.
The Eskimo were taken unprepared. They staggered from their tents, still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which they had never before heard. The poor creatures fled in frantic terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt. A young girl fell coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake. A well-aimed lance had pinioned the living form to earth. She caught Hearne round the knees, imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back with jeers. Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put their victim out of pain. The rocks rang with the mockery of the torturers. She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes. On that scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer 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]
