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Updated: May 31, 2025
Two days after leaving Lake Clowey, they passed out of the woods on to the barren grounds. To facilitate their movements most of the women were presently left behind together with the children and dogs. A number of the braves, weary already of the prospect of the long march, turned back, but Matonabbee, Hearne, and about one hundred and fifty Indians held on with all speed towards the north.
The English whom he thought invincible were defeated and prisoners of war. Hearne, whom the dauntless old chief had led through untold perils, was a captive. Matonabbee's proud spirit was broken. The grief was greater than he could bear. All that living stood for had been lost. Drawing off from observation, Matonabbee blew his brains out.
That was the way Matonabbee had won the Athabascans for the Hudson's Bay Company. Officers of the garrison, bluff sea-captains, spinning yarns of iceberg and floe, soldiers and traders, made up the rest of the company. Among the white men was one eager face, that of Samuel Hearne, who was to explore the interior and now scanned the birch-bark drawings to learn the way to the "Far-off-Metal River."
The savages thereupon set themselves to make wooden shields about three feet long with which to ward off the arrows of the Eskimos. On May 20, a new start was made to the north. Matonabbee and his great company of armed Indians now assumed the appearance of a war party, and hurried eagerly towards the enemy's country.
Matonabbee hastened to relieve the young explorer's sufferings. He provided him with warm deer-skins and, from his ample supplies, prepared a great feast for the good cheer of his new acquaintance. An orgy of eating followed, dear to the Indian heart, and after this, without fire-water to drink, the Indians sang and danced about the fires of the bivouac.
Matonabbee and his braves were now filled with the fierce eagerness of the savage; they crossed hurriedly to the west side of the river, where each Indian painted the shield that he carried with rude daubs of red and black, to imitate the spirits of the earth and air on whom he relied for aid in the coming fight.
To Matonabbee and the other Indians the whole occurrence was viewed as a proper incident of tribal war, and the feeble protests which Hearne contrived to make only drew down upon him the expression of their contempt. After the massacre followed plunder.
Men must travel light of hand, trusting to chance game for food. Women were needed to snare rabbits, catch partridges, bring in game shot by the braves, and attend to the camping. And then in a burst of enthusiasm, perhaps warmed by Hearne's fine tobacco, Matonabbee, who had found the way to the Athabasca, offered to conduct the white man to the "Far-Off-Metal River" of the Arctic Circle.
Marie, Norton's daughter, still lived in the shelter of the fort; the wives found consolation in other husbands; and Matonabbee continued the ambassador of the company to strange tribes.
The marvel is that Hearne ever reached the fort at all. He would not have done so very probably had it not been his fortune to fall in with an Indian chief named Matonabbee, a man of strange and exceptional character, to whom he owed not only his return to Fort Prince of Wales, but his subsequent successful journey to the Coppermine.
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