Only the dread of the French firearms prevented the retreat being converted into a complete disaster.

Whenever the Senekas came near enough to get speech with the French they asked them "why they interfered with native quarrels".
Champlain being unable to walk, the Hurons made a kind of basket, similar to that in which they carried their wounded.

In this he was so crowded into a heap, and bound and pinioned, that it was as impossible for him to move "as it would be for an infant in his swaddling clothes".

This treatment caused him considerable pain after he had been carried for some days; in fact he suffered agonies while fastened in this way on to the back of a savage.
He was afterwards obliged to pass the winter of 1615-6 in the Huron country.

At that time it swarmed with game.