The Eskimo were taken unprepared. They staggered from their tents,
still dazed in sleep, to be mowed down by a crashing of firearms which
they had never before heard. The poor creatures fled in frantic
terror, to be met only by lance point and gun butt. A young girl fell
coiling at Hearne's feet like a wounded snake. A well-aimed lance had
pinioned the living form to earth. She caught Hearne round the knees,
imploring him with dumb entreaty; but the white man was pushed back
with jeers. Sobbing with horror, Hearne begged the Indians to put
their victim out of pain. The rocks rang with the mockery of the
torturers. She was speared to death before Hearne's eyes. On that
scene of indescribable horror the white man could no longer bear to
look. He turned toward the river, and there was a spectacle like a
nightmare. Some of the Eskimo were escaping by leaping to their hide
boats and with lightning strokes of the double-bladed paddles dashing
down the current to the far bank of the river; but sitting motionless
as stone was an old, old woman--probably a witch of the tribe--red-eyed
as if she were blind, deaf to all the noise about her, unconscious of
all her danger, fishing for salmon below the falls. There was a shout
from the raiders; the old woman did not even look up to face her fate;
and she too fell a victim to that thirst for blood which is as
insatiable in the redskin as in the wolf pack. Odd commentary in our
modern philosophies--this white-man explorer, unnerved, unmanned,
weeping with pity, this champion of the weak, jostled aside by
bloodthirsty, triumphant savages, represented the race that was to
jostle the Indian from the face of the New World.
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