Henry went out perpetually to hunt, but all he got during those nine days were two small snow-buntings.  The Canadian half-breeds with him then calmly proposed to kill and feed upon the young woman.  One of these men, indeed, admitted that he had had recourse to this expedient for sustaining life when wintering in the north-west and running out of food.  But Henry indignantly repudiated the suggestion.  Though very weak, he searched everywhere desperately for food, and at last found on a very high rock a thick lichen, called by the French Canadians tripe de roche,[10] looking, in fact, very much like slices of tripe.  Henry fetched the men and the Indian woman, and they set to work gathering quantities of this lichen.  The woman was well acquainted with the mode of preparing it, which was done by boiling it into a thick mucilage, looking rather like the white of an egg.  On this they made hearty meals, though it had a bitter and disagreeable taste.  After the ninth day of their sufferings the wind fell, they continued their journey, and met with kindly Indians, who supplied them with as many fish as they wanted.  Nevertheless, they all were so ill afterwards that they nearly died, from the effects of the lichen diet.

[Footnote 10:  See p. 128.]

Some time after this Henry resolved to search for the marvellous island of Yellow Sands,[11] an island of Lake Superior which, it is true, the French had discovered, but about which they kept up a good deal of mystery.  The Indian legend was that the sands of this small island consisted of gold dust, and the Ojibwe Indians, having discovered this, and attempting to bring some away, they were disturbed by a supernatural being of amazing size, sixty feet in height, which strode into the water and commanded them to deliver back what they had taken away.  Terrified at his gigantic stature, they complied with his request, since which time no Indian has ever dared to approach the haunted coast.  Henry, however, with his men, finally discovered this Island of Yellow Sands in 1771, in the north-east part of Lake Superior.  It was much smaller than he had been led to expect, and very low and studded with small lakes, probably made by the action of beavers damming up the little streams.  He found no supernatural monster to dispute the island with him, but a number of large reindeer, so unused to the sight of man that they scarcely got out of his way, so that he was able to shoot as many as he wanted.  The ancestors of these reindeer may have reached the island either by floating ice or by swimming.  They seem, with the birds, to have been the island’s only inhabitants, and to have increased and multiplied to a remarkable extent, small portions of the island’s surface being actually formed of immense accumulations of reindeer bones.

[Footnote 11:  The Isle of Yellow Sands, famed in legend for its terrible serpents and ogre sixty feet high, was subsequently identified with the Ile de Pont Chartrain, which is distant sixty miles from the north shore of Lake Superior.]