The Hurons with Champlain lost
heart, and insisted on retreating. Only the dread of the French
firearms prevented the retreat being converted into a complete
disaster. Whenever the Senekas came near enough to get speech with the
French they asked them "why they interfered with native quarrels".
Champlain being unable to walk, the Hurons made a kind of basket,
similar to that in which they carried their wounded. In this he was so
crowded into a heap, and bound and pinioned, that it was as impossible
for him to move "as it would be for an infant in his swaddling
clothes". This treatment caused him considerable pain after he had
been carried for some days; in fact he suffered agonies while fastened
in this way on to the back of a savage.
He was afterwards obliged to pass the winter of 1615-6 in the Huron
country. At that time it swarmed with game. Amongst birds, there were
swans, white cranes, brent-geese, ducks, teal, the redbreasted thrush
(which the Americans call "robin"), brown larks (_Anthus_), snipe, and
other birds too numerous to mention, which Champlain seems to have
brought down with his fowling-piece in sufficient quantities to feed
the whole party whilst waiting for the capture of deer on a large
scale.
Meanwhile, many of the Indians were catching fish, "trout and pike of
prodigious size". When they desired to secure a large number of deer,
they would make an enclosure in a fir forest in the form of the two
converging sides of a triangle, with an open base.
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