to the south, away from the north wind.  Snared rabbits and partridges supplied the food.  The way lay as before—­west-northwest—­along a chain of frozen lakes and rivers connecting Hudson Bay with the Arctic Ocean.  By April the marchers were on the margin of a desolate wilderness—­the Indian region of “Little Sticks,”—­known to white men as the Barren Lands, where dwarf trees project above the billowing wastes of snow like dismantled masts on the far offing of a lonely sea.  Game became scarcer.  Neither the round footprint of the hare nor the frost tracery of the northern grouse marked the snowy reaches of unbroken white.  Caribou had retreated to the sheltered woods of the interior; and a cleverer hunter than man had scoured the wide wastes of game.  Only the wolf pack roamed the Barren Lands.  It was unsafe to go on without food.  Hearne kept in camp till the coming of the goose month—­April—­when birds of passage wended their way north.  For three days rations consisted of snow water and pipes of tobacco.  The Indians endured the privations with stoical indifference, daily marching out on a bootless quest for game.  On the third night Hearne was alone in his tent.  Twilight deepened to night, night to morning.  Still no hunters returned.  Had he been deserted?  Not a sound broke the waste silence but the baying of the wolf pack.  Weak from hunger, Hearne fell asleep.  Before daylight he was awakened by a shout; and his Indians shambled over the drifts laden with haunches of half a dozen deer.  That relieved want till the coming of the geese.  In May Hearne struck across the Barren Lands.  By June the rotting snow clogged the snow-shoes.  Dog trains drew heavy, and food was again scarce.  For a week the travellers found nothing to eat but cranberries.  Half the company was ill from hunger when a mangy old musk-ox, shedding his fur and lean as barrel hoops, came scrambling over the rocks, sure of foot as a mountain goat.  A single shot brought him down.  In spite of the musky odor of which the coarse flesh reeked, every morsel of the ox was instantly devoured.  Sometimes during their long fasts they would encounter a solitary Indian wandering over the rocky barren.  If he had arms, gun, or arrow, and carried skins of the chase, he was welcomed to camp, no matter how scant the fare.  Otherwise he was shunned as an outcast, never to be touched or addressed by a human being; for only one thing could have fed an Indian on the Barren Lands who could show no trophies of the chase, and that was the flesh of some human creature weaker than himself.  The outcast was a cannibal, condemned by an unwritten law to wander alone through the wastes.