The explosion drowned his warning, and the next moment he was down stairs dashing from hall to hall, candle in hand, followed by the priest, Sylvie. A plaintive cry came from the closet of what had been the factor’s room. Followed by his powder-grimed, wild raiders, Iberville threw open the door. With a scream, there fell at his feet a woman with a shattered hip. However black a record these raiders left for braining children and mutilating women, four years later in what is now New York State, they made no war on women here. Lifting her to a bed, the priest Sylvie and Iberville called in the surgeon, and barring the door from the outside, forbade intrusion. The raid became a riot. The French possessed Rupert, though little the richer but for the ship and thirty prisoners. The wild wood-rovers were now strong enough to attempt Albany, three hundred miles northwest. It was at Albany that the French spy Péré was supposed to be panting for rescue. It was also at Albany that the English fur traders had their greatest store of pelts. As usual, Iberville led off in canoes; De Troyes, the French fur traders, the soldiers and the captives following with the cannon on the ship. It was sunset when the canoes launched out from Rupert River. To save time by crossing the south end of the bay diagonally, they had sheered out from the coast when there blew down from the upper bay one of those bitter northeast gales, that at once swept a maelstrom of churning ice floes about the cockleshell birch canoes. To make matters worse, fog fell thick as night. A birch canoe in a cross sea is bad enough. With ice floes it was destruction. Some made for the main shore and took refuge on land. The Le Moynes’ two canoes kept on. A sea of boiling ice floes got between the two. There was nothing to do for the night but camp on the shifting ice, hanging for dear life to the canoe held high on the voyageurs’ heads out of danger, clinging hand to hand so that if one man slithered through the iceslush the human rope pulled him out. It was a new kind of canoe work for Iberville’s Indians. When daylight came through the gray fog, Iberville did not wait for the weather to clear. He kept guns firing to guide the canoe that followed and pushed across the traverse, portaging where there was ice, paddling where there was water. Four days the traverse lasted, and not once did this Robin Hood of Canadian wildwoods flinch. The first of August saw his Indians and bush-lopers below the embankments of Albany. A few days later came De Troyes on the boat with soldiers and cannon.