s time Radisson did not
wholly escape. But when, for the second time, he was on the point of
running the gauntlet, for the second time his "mother" rescued him.
His "father" lectured him roundly on the folly of running away from
people who had made him one of the family. Still he exerted himself
strenuously to save Radisson from the death penalty which hung over
him, and succeeded in securing his release after he had been duly
tortured.

"Then," he says, "my father goes to seeke {198} rootes, and my sister
chaws them and my mother applyes them to my sores as a plaster." After
a month of this primitive surgery, he was able to go about again, free.

The winter passed quietly and pleasantly. Then Radisson, anxious to
show himself a thorough Iroquois, proposed to his "father" to let him
go on a war-party. The old brave heartily approved, and the young
renegade set off with a band for the Huron country.

Now follows a dreary account of the atrocities committed. In the end
the party, after perpetrating several murders, encountered a
considerable number of the enemy, with the loss of one of their men
severely wounded. They burned him, to save him from falling into the
enemy's hands, and then fled the country. Their arrival at home, with
prisoners and scalps, mostly of women and children, was an occasion of
great honor, and Radisson came in for his full share.

Being now allowed greater freedom, he improved it to run away to join
the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany). He tramped all the day and all the
night without food, and at daylight found himself near a Dutch
settler's cabin. The Dutch treated him with great kindness, gave him
clothes and {199} shoes, and shipped him down the Hudson to "Menada"
(Manhattan, New York), whence he sailed for Amsterdam. From that port
he took ship for La Rochelle, in France, and thence back to Canada.

To cover a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles, he had been
obliged to travel about seven thousand!

Hitherto we have seen Pierre Radisson figure as a mere _coureur de
bois_. Now we shall see him in the more important role of a discoverer.

Probably he and his brother-in-law, Medard Chouart, who styled himself
the Sieur des Groseillers, in the course of their long trading journeys
among the Indians, in 1658 reached the Mississippi. One important
discovery they unquestionably made a few years later. That they were
the first white men trading in the Lake Superior region i