The two Frenchmen spent the summer and winter of 1661-62 in hunting with the Crees west of Lake Superior, where they met another tribe of Indians--the Stone Boilers, or Assiniboines--who also told them of the great salt water, or Sea of the North. In the spring of 1662, with some Crees of the hinterland, they set out in canoes down one of the rivers--Moose or Abitibi--leading to Hudson Bay. Radisson had sprained his ankle; and the long portages by the banks of the ice-laden, rain-swollen rivers were terrible. The rocks were slippery as glass with ice and moss. The forests of this region are full of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned branch might tear the birch from the bottom of the canoe. When the swamps finally narrowed to swift rivers, blankets were hoisted as sails, and the brigade of canoes swept out to the sandy sea of Hudson Bay. 'We were in danger to perish a thousand times from the ice,' Radisson writes, 'but at last we came full sail from a deep bay to the seaside, where we found an old house all demolished and battered with bullets. The Crees told us about Europeans. We went from isle to isle all that summer in the Bay of the North. We passed the summer coasting the seaside.' Had Radisson found Hudson Bay? Some historians dispute his claims; but even if his assertion that he sailed 'from isle to isle' during the summer of 1662 be challenged, the fact that his companion, Groseilliers, knew enough of the Bay to enable him six years later to guide a ship round by sea to 'a rendezvous' on the Rupert river must be accepted. The only immediate results of the discovery to Radisson and Groseilliers were condign punishment, disgrace, and almost utter ruin. When they came back to the St Lawrence in the summer of 1663 with several hundred Indians and a flotilla of canoes swarming over the surface of the river below the heights of Quebec, and conveying a great cargo of beaver skins, the avaricious old governor affected furious rage because the two traders had broken the law by going to the woods without his permission. The explorers were heavily fined, and a large quantity of their beaver was seized to satisfy the revenue tax. Of the immense cargo brought down, Radisson and Groseilliers were permitted to keep only a small remainder.