296 THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE BY LAND. 



returned empty-haiided. The Assiniboine arrived 

 about tbe same time, and, producing a marten, threw 

 it down, saying drily, " J'ai trouve rien que cela et un 

 homme — un mort." He directed us where to find the 

 dead body, which was only a few hundred yards from 

 camp, and we set off with the boy to have a look 

 at the ominous spectacle. After a long search, we 

 discovered it at the foot of a large pine. The corpse 

 was in a sitting posture, with the legs crossed, and 

 the arms clasped over the knees, bending forward over 

 the ashes of a miserable fire of small sticks. The 

 ghastly figure was headless, and the cervical vertebrae 

 projected dry and bare ; the skin, brown and shrivelled, 

 stretched like parchment tightly over the bony frame- 

 work, so that the ribs showed through distinctly 

 prominent ; the cavity of the chest and abdomen was 

 filled with the exuviae of chrysales, and the arms and 

 legs resembled those of a mummy. The clothes, con- 

 sisting of woollen shirt and leggings, with a tattered 

 blanket, still hung round the shrunken form. Near 

 the body were a small axe, fire-bag, large tin kettle, 

 and two baskets made of birch-bark. In the bag 

 were flint, steel, and tinder, an old knife, and a single 

 charge of shot carefully tied up in a piece of rag. One 

 of the baskets contained a fishing-line of cedar bark, 

 not yet finished, and two curious hooks, made of a piece 

 of stick and a pointed wire ; the other, a few wild 

 onions, still green and growing. A heap of broken 

 bones at the skeleton's side — the fragments of a horse's 

 head — told the sad story of his fate. They were 

 chipped into the smallest pieces, showing that the un- 

 fortunate man had died of starvation, and prolonged 



