The Eskimo were taken unprepared.  They staggered from their tents, still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which they had never before heard.  The poor creatures fled in frantic terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt.  A young girl fell coiling at Hearne’s feet like a wounded snake.  A well-aimed lance had pinioned the living form to earth.  She caught Hearne round the knees, imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back with jeers.  Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put their victim out of pain.  The rocks rang with the mockery of the torturers.  She was speared to death before Hearne’s eyes.  On that scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to look.  He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a nightmare.  Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless as stone was an old, old woman—­probably a witch of the tribe—­red-eyed as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls.  There was a shout from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate; and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack.  Odd commentary in our modern philosophies—­this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned, weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to jostle the Indian from the face of the New World.  Something more than a triumphant, aggressive Strength was needed to the permanency of a race; and that something more was represented by poor, weak, vacillating Hearne, weeping like a woman.

Horror of the massacre robbed Hearne of all an explorer’s exultation.  A day afterward, on July 17, he stood on the shores of the Arctic Ocean,—­the first white man to reach it overland in America.  Ice extended from the mouth of the river as far as eye could see.  Not a sign of land broke the endless reaches of cold steel, where the snow lay, and icy green, where pools of the ocean cast their reflection on the sky of the far horizon.  At one in the morning, with the sun hanging above the river to the south, Hearne formally took possession of the Arctic regions for the Hudson’s Bay Company.  The same Company rules those regions to-day.  Not an eye had been closed for three days and nights.  Throwing themselves down on the wet shore, the entire band now slept for six hours.  The hunters awakened to find a musk-ox nosing over the mossed rocks.  A shot sent it tumbling over the cliffs.  Whether it was that the moss was too wet for fuel to cook the meat, or the massacre had brutalized the men into beasts of prey, the Indians fell on the carcass and devoured it raw.[2]