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back up the Coppermine as far as conditions would allow, but after struggling through the storm-tossed waves, he realized that the water route would have to be abandoned. They would have to make the return journey on foot and their first destination, the base camp at Fort Enterprise, was 325 miles away.
    Winter was dead upon them by September 5. Three feet of snow fell, and temperatures plummeted to twenty degrees below. Franklin described their dire situation: “As we…were destitute of the means of making a fire, we remained in our beds all the day; but our blankets were insufficient to prevent us from feeling the severity of the frost, and suffering inconvenience from the drifting of the snow into our tents. There was no abatement of the storm next day and; our tents were completely frozen, and the snow had drifted around them to a depth of three feet; even in the inside there was a covering of several inches on our blankets.” The men were so frozen and debilitated that they were barely able to pack after Franklin made the decision to move camp: “The morning of the 7th cleared up a little bit … from the unusual continuance of the storm we feared that the winter had set in with all its vigour and that by longer delay we should only be exposed to an accumulation of difficulties; we therefore prepared for our journey, although we were in a very unfit condition for starting, being weak from fasting, and our garments stiffened from the frost. A considerable time was consumed in packing up the frozen tents and bed-clothes, the winds blowing so strong that no one could keep his hands long out of his mittens.”
    They had now run completely out of food and were reduced to eating the lichen that grew on rocks and the boiled leather upper parts of their shoes. Their only chance for survival, Franklin decided, was to split up. On October 4, he sent Back and others off to see if he could find the Indians who had earlier abandoned them, hoping that if found, they would come to their rescue with food and supplies. Soon after Back departed, one of the voyageurs in his party, weakened by hunger and scurvy, dropped dead in his tracks. He was not the only one to have become desperately afflicted. Hood was so weak that he found it impossible to continue. To their credit, Richardson and Hepburn chose to risk their own lives by setting up camp, staying with him until help arrived.
    In the meantime, Franklin and the remaining members of the expedition moved on. They had not gone far when four of the group decided that they would never be able to make it all the way to Fort Enterprise, still 350 miles away. Their only hope, they decided, was to head back to Richardson’s camp. An Indian named Michel was the only one to reach the encampment. One by one, the others had died en route. For those in the camp, Michel appeared just in time, for he brought with him meat that he claimed he “had found from a wolf which had been killed by the stroke of a deer’s horn.” Although the meat tasted unlike anything they had ever eaten, Richardson, Hood, and Hepburn were literally starving and devoured it greedily. But from Michel’s questionable explanation of where it had come from and from the Indian’s demeanor, Richardson began to have a sickening suspicion of what they had just eaten. To his horror, he became convinced that the meat must have come from the bodies of the voyageurs, who had died en route to his camp.
    In the days that followed, Michel’s behavior became increasingly disturbing to the others. At times the Indian, who was armed with both pistol and knife, became openly hostile. Then, on a day when Richardson was off seeking lichen, they were suddenly alarmed at the sound of a gunshot coming from their camp. Racing back they discovered Hood lying dead on the ground from, as Richardson described it, “a shot that had entered the back part of his head and passed out of the forehead.”