g his
meat quite raw. "Notwithstanding these accumulated and complicated
hardships, we continued in perfect health and good spirits." The
average day's walk was twenty miles, sometimes without any other
subsistence than a pipe of tobacco and a drink of water.

At last they saw three musk oxen grazing by the side of a small lake.
This seemed a splendid piece of fortune, but, to their mortification,
before they could get one of them skinned, a tremendous downpour of
rain ensued, so as to make it out of their power to have a fire, for
their only form of fuel was moss. And the flesh of the musk ox eaten
raw was disgusting; it was coarse and tough, and tasted so strongly of
musk that Hearne could hardly swallow it. "None of our natural wants,"
he writes, "except thirst, are so distressing or hard to endure as
hunger.... For want of action, the stomach so far loses its digestive
powers that, after long fasting, it resumes its office with pain and
reluctance." After these prolonged fasts, his stomach was scarcely
able to contain two or three ounces of food without producing the most
agonizing pain. "We fasted many times two whole days and nights, and
twice for three days; once for nearly seven days, during which we
tasted not a mouthful of anything, except a few cranberries, water,
scraps of old leather, and burnt bones."

At a place 63 deg. north latitude he bought a canoe for a single knife
"the full value of which did not exceed one penny", having been told
that they would soon reach rivers through which they could not wade.
And, moreover, they found an Indian who was willing to carry it. In
July his guide persuaded him to join an encampment of natives--about
six hundred persons living in seventy tents--asserting that, as it was
no use proceeding much farther north in their search for the
Coppermine River that season, it would be well to winter to the west,
and resume their northern journey in the spring. The country, though
quite devoid of trees, and mostly barren rock, was covered with a herb
or shrub called by the Indian name of Wishakapakka,[2] from which the
European servants of the Hudson's Bay Company had long been used to
prepare a kind of tea by steeping it in boiling water. Here there were
multitudes of reindeer feeding on the _Cladina_ lichen and the Indians
with Hearne killed large numbers for the food of the party, and also
for their skins and the marrow in their bones.

[Footnote 2: This word is said to be