Thus, first of all white men coming overland, he reached the sea coast of the Arctic Ocean.  The tide was then out, and a good deal of the sea surface was covered with ice, on which he observed many seals lying about.  Along the sea coast and river banks were many birds; gulls, divers or loons, golden plovers, green plovers, curlews, geese, and swans.  The country a little way inland was obviously inhabited by numbers of musk oxen, reindeer, bears, wolves, gluttons, foxes, polar hares, snowy owls, ravens, ptarmigans, gopher ground-squirrels, stoats (ermines), and mice.  In this region also he saw a bird which the Copper Indians called the Alarm Bird.  He tells us that in size and colour it resembles a “Cobadekoock”; but as none of us know what that is, we can only go on to imagine that the Alarm Bird was a kind of owl, as Hearne says it was “of the owl genus”.  When it perceived people or beasts it directed its way towards them immediately, and, after hovering over them for some time, flew over them in circles or went away with them in the same direction as they walked.  All this time the bird made a loud screaming noise like the cry of a child.  These owls were sometimes accustomed to follow the Indians for a whole day, and the Copper Indians believed that they would in some way conduct them to herds of deer and musk oxen, which without the birds’ assistance might never be found.  They also warned Indians of the arrival of strangers.  The Eskimo, according to Hearne, paid no heed to these birds, and it was thus that they allowed themselves to be surprised and massacred, for if they had looked out from the direction in which the Chipewayans were lying in ambush, they would have seen a large flock of these owls continually flying about and making sufficient noise to awaken any man out of the soundest sleep.

The country on either side of the estuary of the Coppermine River was not without vegetation.  There were stunted pines and tufts of dwarf willows, and the ground was covered with a lichen or herb, which the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company knew by the name of Wishakapaka,[7] and which they dried and used instead of tea.  There were also cranberry and heathberry bushes, but without fruit.  The scrub grew gradually thinner and smaller as one approached the sea, and at the mouth of the river there was nothing but barren hills and marsh.

[Footnote 7:  Ledum palustre.]

The unfortunate Eskimo of this region, judging by the examples seen by Hearne, were of low stature, with broad thickset bodies.  Their complexion was a dirty copper colour, but some of the women were almost fair and ruddy.  Their dress, their arms and fishing tackle were precisely similar to those of the Greenland Eskimo.  Their tents were made of deerskins, and were pitched in a circular form.  But these were only their summer habitations, those for the winter being partly underground, with a roof framework of poles, over which skins were stretched;