It was a year and a half before his white comrades saw him again. Now, however, he had great things to tell. He had not only found the Coppermine River, but had followed it down and down to its very mouth. There at last, on the 17th of July, he had looked out upon the Arctic Sea. It was truly the North-west Passage, or one of the North-west Passages, that lay before his eyes, for its waters connect with both oceans, east and west; but he could not be sure of that. Indeed it took a hundred years more of exploration to prove the fact. The young explorer had a bitter experience in the far north, the country of the Eskimo. These “Usquemows,” as the old travellers called them, were an interesting and generally harmless folk. Captain Coats gives a quaint description of them, as he used to see them on his many voyages through Hudson Straits: “Bold, robust, hardy people, undaunted, masculine men, no tokens of poverty or want, with great, fat, flatt, greazy faces, little black piercing eyes, good teeth, lank, black, matted hair, with little hands and feet, under proportion; a well made back and shoulders; loyns, buttocks and haunces well fortified; thighs are pretty full, but their legs taper to a little foot.” The women, he says, are “very fair when free from greese, very submissive to their men, very tender of their children, and are indefatigable in the gew-gaws to please their men and children,”—little ivory toys carved like fishes, fowls, animals, people, ships and boats. The Indians, however, had “no use for” the Eskimo, except to raid and rob and kill them. A band of Indians who had joined Hearne’s party, apparently for this very object, attacked an Eskimo village, without the slightest provocation, while the people were asleep in their tents, and slaughtered them, men, women and children. The horrified white man tried to stop the massacre, but the Indians pushed him aside. The Eskimo had furs, the white men wanted furs, and the Indians thought it unreasonable for a white man to object if they got those furs by murder. As for the mountains of copper which the Indians had described, Hearne found only “a jumble of rocks and gravel,” and the best specimen he could find was a lump of ore weighing about four pounds. Coming back from the Arctic, on Christmas Eve he found himself looking out upon a vast lake which no white man had seen before and few have seen since. We know it on the map as Great Slave Lake. In Hearne’s time, buffalo beyond numbering roamed the plains up to its southern shore. He spent the rest of the winter among the Indians, and when spring came a party of them accompanied him down to the fort on Hudson Bay.