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94 Juvenile Letters.
the northern ocean, an immense tract of country, unknown to the civilized world. Mr. Hearne is the only white man, ever known to have penetrated to any great extend into that wilderness. He found the inhabitants in a most debated situation; miserably poor, ignorant, and barbarous. At the extremity of his journey, where the Copper-mine river empties into the north sea, the fun is above the horizon the whole twenty-four hours in the summer season. Mr. Hearne suffered much from cold and hunger; depending wholly for subsistence upon what game he might have chance to kill on his journey, or fifth he might take in river and lakes.
On his return home, he says, "On the
"eleventh of January, as some of my companions were hunting, they saw the track of a strange Snow-shoe, which they followed ; and at a considerable distance a young woman sitting alone. As they found that she understood their language, they brought her with them to the tents. On examination, 
Juvenile Letters. 95
"tion, she proved to be one of the Western Dogribbed Indians, who had been taken prisoner by the Athapuscow Indians, in the Summer of 1770; and in the following Summer, when the Indians that took her priisoner were near this part, she had eloped from them, with an iintent to return to her own country ; but the distance being so great, and having, after she was taken prisoner, been carried iin a canoe the whole way, the turnings and windings of the rivers and lakes were so numerous, that she forgot the track ; so she built the hut in which we found her, to protect her from the weather during the winter, and here she had resided from the first setting in of the fall.
"From her account of the moons past since her elopement, it appeared that she had been near seven months without seeing a human face ; during all whiich time she had supported herself verywell by snarinig partridges , rabbits, and squirrels. She had also killed two or three beavers, and some porcupines. That she did not seem to have been in want
"is