[Footnote 230: "That sa their Karlsefni at Skraelingar faerdhu upp a stoeng knoett stundar mykinn thvi naer til at jafna sem saudharvoemb, ok helzt blan at lit, ok fleygdhu af stoenginni upp a landit yfir lidh theirra Karlsefnis, ok let illilega vidhr, thar sem nidhr kom. Vidh thetta slo otta myklum a Karlsefni ok allt lidh hans, sva at tha fysti engis annars enn flyja, ok halda undan upp medh anni, thviat theim thotti lidh Skraelinga drifa at ser allum megin, ok letta eigi, fyrr enn their koma til hamra nokkurra, ok veittu thar vidhrtoeku hardha," i. e. "Viderunt Karlsefniani quod Skraelingi longurio sustulerunt globum ingentem, ventri ovillo haud absimilem, colore fere caeruleo; hune ex longurio in terram super manum Karlsefnianorum contorserunt, qui ut decidit, dirum sonuit. Hac re terrore perculsus est Karlsefnius suique omnes, ut nihil aliud cuperent quam fugere et gradum referre sursum secundum fluvium: credebant enim se ab Skraelingis undique circumveniri. Hinc non gradum stitere, priusquam ad rupes quasdam pervenissent, ubi acriter resistebant." Rafn, p. 153.] [Footnote 231: Schoolcraft, _Archives of Aboriginal Knowledge_, Philadelphia, 1860, 6 vols. 4to, vol. i. p. 89; a figure of this weapon is given in the same volume, plate xv. fig. 2, from a careful description by Chingwauk, an Algonquin chief.] [Sidenote: The uniped.] The coexistence of so many unmistakable marks of truth in our narratives may fairly be said to amount to a demonstration that they must be derived, through some eminently trustworthy channel, from the statements of intelligent eye-witnesses who took part in the events related. Here and there, no doubt, we come upon some improbable incident or a touch of superstition, such as we need not go back to the eleventh century to find very common among seamen's narratives; but the remarkable thing in the present case is that there are so few such features. One fabulous creature is mentioned. Thorfinn and his men saw from their vessel a glittering speck upon the shore at an opening in the woods. They hailed it, whereupon the creature proceeded to perform the quite human act of shooting an arrow, which killed the man at the helm. The narrator calls it a "uniped," or some sort of one-footed goblin,[232] but that is hardly reasonable, for after the shooting it went on to perform the further quite human and eminently Indian-like act of running away.[233] Evidently this discreet "uniped" was impressed with the desirableness of living to fight another day. In a narrative otherwise characterized by sobriety, such an instance of fancy, even supposing it to have come down from the original sources, counts for as much or as little as Henry Hudson's description of a mermaid.[234]