Winter was passed deer hunting to lay up stock of provisions for the inland journey. All would have gone well had it not been for the traitors in camp, with minds poisoned by Northwest Company spies. On Christmas day, MacDonell gave his men a feast and on New Year’s day the chief factor of York, Mr. Cook, sent across the usual treat. Irish rowdies celebrated the night by trying to break the heads of the Glasgow clerks. Then the discontent instilled by Nor’West agents began to work. If this country did not belong to the Hudson’s Bay, why should these men obey MacDonell? On February 12th, one put the matter to the test by flatly refusing to work. MacDonell ordered the fellow confined in a hut. Fourteen of the Glasgow clerks broke into the hut, released the rebel, set fire to the cabin and spent the night in a riotous dance round the blaze. When MacDonell haled the offenders before Mr. Hillier, a justice of the peace, they contemptuously walked out of the extemporized court. The Governor called on Mr. Auld of Churchill for advice, and learned from him that by a recent parliamentary act known as 43rd Geo. III, all legal disputes of the Indian country could be tried only in Canada. “_If that is so_,” writes the distracted MacDonell, seeing at a glance all the train of ills that were to come when Hudson’s Bay matters were to be tried in Canadian courts made up of Northwest partners, “_then adieu to all redress for us, my lord_.” But Auld and Cook, the two factors, knew a trick to bring mutineers to time. They cut off all supplies. The men might as well have been marooned on a desert island. By the time boats were ready to be launched in June, the rebels were on their knees with contrition. Wisely, MacDonell did not take such unruly spirits along as colonists. He left them at the forts as clerks. Spring came at last, tardy and cold with blustering winds that jammed the ice at the river mouths and flooded the flats with seas of floating floes. Day after day, week after week, all the month of May, until the 21st of June, the ice float swept past endlessly on the swollen flood. MacDonell ordered the cabins evacuated and baggage taken to Hayes River round the submerged marsh. At York, four large boats--twenty-eight feet long and flat-bottomed--were in readiness to convey the people. While the colonists camped, there came sweeping down the Hayes on June the 29th, in light birch canoes, the spring fur brigade of Saskatchewan, led by Bird and Howse. All rivers were reported free of ice. MacDonell marshaled his colonists to return with the brigade.