The weather was dazzlingly clear, with that burnished brightness of polished steel known only where unbroken sunlight meets unbroken snow glare.  On the 7th of December, 1770, Hearne left the fort, led by Matonabbee and followed by the slave Indians with the dog sleighs.  One of Matonabbee’s wives lay ill; but that did not hinder the iron pathfinder.  The woman was wrapped in robes and drawn on a dog sleigh.  There was neither pause nor hesitation.  If the woman recovered, good.  If she died, they would bury her under a cairn of stones as they travelled.  Matonabbee struck directly west-northwest for some caches of provisions which he had left hidden on the trail.  The place was found; but the caches had been rifled clean of food.  That did not stop Matonabbee.  Nor did he show the slightest symptoms of anger.  He simply hastened their pace the more for their hunger, recognizing the unwritten law of the wilderness—­that starving hunters who had rifled the cache had a right to food wherever they found it.  Day after day, stoical as men of bronze, the marchers reeled off the long white miles over the snowy wastes, pausing only for night sleep with evening and morning meals.  Here nibbled twigs were found; there the stamping ground of a deer shelter; elsewhere the small, cleft foot-mark like the ace of hearts.  But the signs were all old.  No deer were seen.  Even the black marble eye that betrays the white hare on the snow, and the fluffy bird track of the feather-footed northern grouse, grew rarer; and the slave women came in every morning empty-handed from untouched snares.  In spite of hunger and cold, Matonabbee remained good-natured, imperturbable, hard as a man of bronze, coursing with the winged speed of snow-shoes from morning till night without pause, going to a bed of rock moss on a meal of snow water and rising eager as an arrow to leave the bow-string for the next day’s march.  For three days before Christmas the entire company had no food but snow.  Christmas was celebrated by starvation.  Hearne could not indulge in the despair of the civilized man’s self-pity when his faithful guides went on without complaint.

[Illustration:  Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun.—­C.  W. Mathers.]

By January the company had entered the Barren Lands.  The Barren Lands were bare but for an occasional oasis of trees like an island of refuge in a shelterless sea.  In the clumps of dwarf shrubs, the Indians found signs that meant relief from famine—­tufts of hair rubbed off on tree trunks, fallen antlers, and countless heart-shaped tracks barely puncturing the snow but for the sharp outer edge.  The caribou were on their yearly traverse east to west for the shelter of the inland woods.  The Indians at once pitched camp.  Scouts went scouring to find which way the caribou herds were coming.  Pounds of snares were constructed of shrubs and saplings stuck up in palisades with scarecrows on the pickets round