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.