However, in the subsequent fighting which occurred when they reached the six-sided stockade of the Senekas (a strong fortification which faced a large pond on one side, and was surrounded by a moat everywhere else except at the entrance), the Hurons and Algonkins showed a great lack of discipline.  Champlain and the few Frenchmen with him, by using their arquebuses, drove the enemy back into the fort, but not without having some of their Indian allies wounded or killed.  Champlain proposed to the Hurons that they should erect what was styled in French a cavalier—­a kind of box, with high, loopholed sides, which was erected on a tall scaffolding of stout timbers.  This was to be carried by the Hurons to within a pike’s length of the stockade.  Four French arquebusiers then scrambled up into the cavalier and fired through the loopholes into the huts of the Seneka town.  Meantime the Hurons were to set fire, if possible, to the wooden stockade.  They managed the whole business so stupidly that the fire produced no effect, the flames being blown in the opposite direction to that which was desired.  The brave Senekas threw water on to the blazing sticks and put out the fire.  Champlain was wounded by an arrow in the leg and knee.  The reinforcement of the five hundred Hurons expected by the allies did not turn up.  The Hurons with Champlain lost heart, and insisted on retreating.  Only the dread of the French firearms prevented the retreat being converted into a complete disaster.  Whenever the Senekas came near enough to get speech with the French they asked them “why they interfered with native quarrels”.

Champlain being unable to walk, the Hurons made a kind of basket, similar to that in which they carried their wounded.  In this he was so crowded into a heap, and bound and pinioned, that it was as impossible for him to move “as it would be for an infant in his swaddling clothes”.  This treatment caused him considerable pain after he had been carried for some days; in fact he suffered agonies while fastened in this way on to the back of a savage.

He was afterwards obliged to pass the winter of 1615-6 in the Huron country.  At that time it swarmed with game.  Amongst birds, there were swans, white cranes, brent-geese, ducks, teal, the redbreasted thrush (which the Americans call “robin"), brown larks (Anthus), snipe, and other birds too numerous to mention, which Champlain seems to have brought down with his fowling-piece in sufficient quantities to feed the whole party whilst waiting for the capture of deer on a large scale.

Meanwhile, many of the Indians were catching fish, “trout and pike of prodigious size”.  When they desired to secure a large number of deer, they would make an enclosure in a fir forest in the form of the two converging sides of a triangle, with an open base.  The two sides of these traps were made of great stakes of wood closely pressed together, from 8 to 9 feet high; and each of the sides was 1000