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whence it happens that the moose and beaver did not make their appearance there until long after this sad accident. The greatest trouble which this gives to voyagers who traverse those burnt woods is that they can neither find a spot to camp in, sheltered from the wind, nor wood suitable to warm one's self with. Yet it was in these sad solitudes, a thousand times more frightful than those of Arabia Petraea, that we were wandering, because we wished to follow the tracks of some Indians who were hunting beaver, and, desiring to examine the turns and detours of these Indians and of these animals, we took a wrong road, and strayed from that which was without doubt the more correct and certain."
For three days the party wandered in this desert until they became nearly exhausted from fatigue and suffering. The next day they continued their route under additional difficulties, owing to a great quantity of snow which had fallen during the preceding night, and in which their snowshoes sank deeply; the fatigue and want of food, having but a morsel of bread to eat each day, the Indian and Father LeClerc became exhausted, while the poor squaw and her little child excited the compassion of all.
M. Henaut was the only one who preserved his courage, breaking the road with his snowshoes through the new fallen snow, the Indian following with his wife and child behind him, Father LeClerc being the last of the troop as one most unused to this life. At this point M. Henaut disclosed to the father that they had been lost for three days, and that the party must now go where it pleased God to conduct them.
It was then snowing, and they had to continue walking until night in order to find a place to camp in. For three days they had eaten only a small morsel of bread in the evening; this failed and they were compelled to have recourse to the flour which the Indian had in his pack, and they were reduced to the necessity of thinning two or three pinches of it in the morning and evening with a kettle full of boiling snow water, which it seemed to whiten rather than to nourish them. M. Henaut consoled Father