The Onondagas were too deep to reveal their plots with seven armed Frenchmen in pursuit.  The Indians permitted the French boats to come up with the main band.  All camped together in the most friendly fashion that night; but the next morning one Iroquois offered passage in his canoe to one Frenchman, another Iroquois to another of the whites, and by the third day, when they came to Lake St. Francis, the old canoe had been abandoned.  The French were scattered promiscuously among the Iroquois, with no two whites in one boat.  The Hurons were quicker to read the signs of treachery than the French.  There were rumors of one hundred Mohawks lying in ambush at the Thousand Islands to massacre the coming Hurons.  On the morning of August 3 four Huron warriors and two women seized a canoe, and to the great astonishment of the encampment launched out before they could be stopped.  Heading the canoe back for Montreal, they broke out in a war chant of defiance to the Iroquois.

The Onondagas made no sign, but they evidently took council to delay no longer.  Again, when they embarked, they allowed no two whites in one canoe.  The boats spread out.  Nothing was said to indicate anything unusual.  The lake lay like a silver mirror in the August sun.  The water was so clear that the Indians frequently paused to spear fish lying below on the stones.  At places the canoes skirted close to the wood-fringed shore, and braves landed to shoot wild-fowl.  Radisson and Ragueneau seemed simultaneously to have noticed the same thing.  Without any signal, at about four in the afternoon, the Onondagas steered their canoes for a wooded island in the middle of the St. Lawrence.  With Radisson were three Iroquois and a Huron.  As the canoe grated shore, the bowman loaded his musket and sprang into the thicket.  Naturally, the Huron turned to gaze after the disappearing hunter.  Instantly, the Onondaga standing directly behind buried his hatchet in the Huron’s head.  The victim fell quivering across Radisson’s feet and was hacked to pieces by the other Iroquois.  Not far along the shore from Radisson, the priest was landing.  He noticed an Iroquois chief approach a Christian Huron girl.  If the Huron had not been a convert, she might have saved her life by becoming one of the chief’s many slaves; but she had repulsed the Onondaga pagan.  As Ragueneau looked, the girl fell dead with her skull split by the chief’s war-axe.  The Hurons on the lake now knew what awaited them; and a cry of terror arose from the children.  Then a silence of numb horror settled over the incoming canoes.  The women were driven ashore like lambs before wolves; but the valiant Hurons would not die without striking one blow at their inveterate and treacherous enemies.  They threw themselves together back to back, prepared to fight.  For a moment this show of resistance drove off the Iroquois.  Then the Onondaga chieftain rushed forward, protesting that the two murders had been a personal quarrel.