These Skraelings were clad in skins, and their weapons were bows and arrows, slings, and stone hatchets. In the latter we may now, I think, be allowed to recognize the familiar tomahawk; and when we read that, in a sharp fight with the natives, Thorbrand, son of the commander Snorro, was slain, and the woman Freydis afterward found his corpse in the woods, with a flat stone sticking in the head, and his naked sword lying on the ground beside him, we seem to see how it all happened.[227] We seem to see the stealthy Indian suddenly dealing the death-blow, and then obliged for his own safety to dart away among the trees without recovering his tomahawk or seizing the sword. The Skraelings came up the river or lake in a swarm of canoes, all yelling at the top of their voices (_et illi omnes valde acutum ululabant_), and, leaping ashore, began a formidable attack with slings and arrows. The narrative calls these canoes "skin-boats" (_hudhkeipar_), whence it has been inferred that the writer had in mind the _kayaks_ and _umiaks_ of the Eskimos.[228] I suspect that the writer did have such boats in mind, and accordingly used a word not strictly accurate. Very likely his authorities failed to specify a distinction between bark-boats and skin-boats, and simply used the handiest word for designating canoes as contrasted with their own keeled boats.[229] [Footnote 227: "Hun fann fyrir ser mann daudhan, thar var Thorbrandr Snorrason, ok stodh hellusteinn i hoefdhi honum; sverdhit la bert i hja honum," i. e. "Illa incidit in mortuum hominem, Thorbrandum Snorrii filium, cujus capiti lapis planus impactus stetit; nudus juxta eum gladius jacuit." Rafn, p. 154.] [Footnote 228: These Eskimo skin-boats are described in Rink's _Danish Greenland_, pp. 113, 179.] [Footnote 229: Cf. Storm, _op. cit._ pp. 366, 367.]