<h2 class="nobreak" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV.</h2></div>
<div class="blockquot inhead medium">
<p>The Wilderness.—A Sunset-Scene.—A white Savage.—Cerf-vola
the Untiring.—Doggerel for a Dog.—The Hill of the
Wolverine.—The Indian Paradise.—I plan a Surprise.—Biscuits
and Water.</p>
</div>
<p class="in0"><span class="firstword">It</span> was the 4th of October, bright with the warmth of
the fading summer—that quiet glow which lingers
over the face of nature, like the hectic flush upon
a dying beauty, ere the wintry storms come to
kill.</p>
<p>Small and insignificant, the Musk-Rat Creek
flows on towards Lake Manitoba amidst bordering
thickets of oak and elm trees. On each side, a
prairie just beginning to yellow under the breath
of the cold night wind; behind, towards the east,
a few far-scattered log-houses smoke, and a trace
of husbandry; the advanced works of that army
whose rear-guard reaches to the Vistula; before,
towards the west, the sun going down over the
great silent wilderness. How difficult to realize
it! How feeble are our minds to gauge its
depths!</p>
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">22</span></p>
<p>He who rides for months through the vast solitudes
sees during the hours of his daily travel an
unbroken panorama of distance. The seasons
come and go; grass grows and flowers die; the
fire leaps with tiger bounds along the earth; the
snow lies still and quiet over hill and lake; the
rivers rise and fall, but the rigid features of the
wilderness rest unchanged. Lonely, silent, and
impassive; heedless of man, season, or time, the
weight of the Infinite seems to brood over it.
Once only in the hours of day and night a moment
comes when this impassive veil is drawn from
its features, and the eye of the wanderer catches a
glimpse of the sunken soul of the wilderness; it
is the moment which follows the sunset; then a
deeper stillness steals over the earth, colours of
wondrous hue rise and spread along the western
horizon. In a deep sea of emerald and orange of
fifty shades, mingled and interwoven together,
rose-coloured isles float anchored to great golden
threads; while, far away, seemingly beyond and
above all, one broad flash of crimson light, the
parting sun’s last gift, reddens upwards to the
zenith. And then, when every moment brings a
change, and the night gathers closer to the earth,
and some waveless, nameless lake glimmers in uncertain
shore-line and in shadow of inverted hill-top;
when a light that seems born of another world<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">23</span>
(so weirdly distant is it from ours) lingers along
the western sky, then hanging like a lamp over
the tomb of the sun, the Evening Star gleams out
upon the darkening wilderness.</p>
<p>It may be only a fancy, a conceit bred from
loneliness and long wandering, but at such
times the great solitude has seemed to me to
open its soul, and that in its depths I read its
secrets.</p>
<p>Ten days dawned and died; the Mauvais Bois,
the Sand Ridges, western shore of an older world’s
immense lake, the Pine Creek, the far-stretching
hills of the Little Saskatchewan rose, drew near,
and faded behind us. A wild, cold storm swept
down from the north, and, raging a day and a
night, tore the yellow leaves from the poplar
thickets, and scared the wild fowl far southward
to a warmer home.</p>
<p>Late on the 10th of October we reached the
Hudson’s Bay Company’s post of Beaver Creek,
the western limit to the travels of my friend.
Here, after a stay of three days and a feast of
roasted beaver, we parted; he to return to Killarney,
St. Stephen’s, and Denominational Education—a
new name for the old feud between those great
patriot armies, the <em>Ins</em> and the <em>Outs</em>; I to seek
the lonely lands where, far beyond the distant
Saskatchewan, the great Unchagah, parent of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">24</span>
a still mightier stream, rolls through remote
lakes and whispering pines its waters to the Polar
Seas.</p>
<p>With one man, three horses and three dogs, and
all those requisites of food, arms, and raiment
with which a former journey had familiarized me,
I started on the 14th of October bound for the
North-west. I was virtually alone; my companion
was a half-breed taken at chance from the
wigwam at the scene of the dog Pony’s midnight
escapade on the Red River. Chance had on
this occasion proved a failure, and the man had
already shown many symptoms of worthlessness.
He had served as a soldier in an American corps
raised by a certain Hatch, to hold in check the
Sioux after the massacre of Minnesota in 1862.
A raid made by nine troopers of this corps, against
an Indian tent occupied by some dozen women
and children, appears to have been the most noteworthy
event in the history of Hatch’s Battalion.
Having surrounded the wigwam in the night, these
cowards shot the miserable inmates, then scalping
and mutilating their bodies they returned to their
comrades, bearing the gory scalp-locks as trophies
of their prowess.</p>
<p>Hatch is said to have at once forwarded to
Washington a despatch, announcing “a decisive
victory over the Sioux by the troops under his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">25</span>
command.” But a darker sequel to the tale must
remain in shadow, for, if the story told to a Breton
missionary rests on a base of truth, the history
of human guilt may be searched in vain for a
parallel of atrocity.</p>
<p>I had other companions besides this <i xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">ci-devant</i>
trooper, of a far more congenial nature, to share
my spare time with. A good dog is so much a
nobler beast than an indifferent man that one
sometimes gladly exchanges the society of one for
that of the other.</p>
<p>A great French writer has told us that animals
were put on earth to show us the evil effects of
passions run riot and unchecked. But it seems to
me that the reverse would be closer to the truth.
The humanity which Napoleon deemed a dog
taught to man on Bassano’s battle-field is not the
only virtue we can learn from that lower world
which is bound to us by such close ties, and yet
lies so strangely apart from us. Be that as it may,
a man can seldom feel alone if he has a dog to share
his supper, to stretch near him under the starlight,
to answer him with tail-wag, or glance of eye, or
prick of ear.</p>
<p>Day after day Cerf-vola and his comrades trotted
on in all the freedom which summer and autumn
give to the great dog family in the north. Now
chasing a badger, who invariably popped into his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">26</span>
burrow in time to save his skin; now sending a
pack of prairie grouse flying from the long grass;
now wading breast-deep into a lake where a few
wild ducks still lingered, loath to quit their summer
nesting-haunts.</p>
<p>Of all the dogs I have known Cerf-vola possessed
the largest share of tact. He never fought
a pitched battle, yet no dog dared dispute his
supremacy. Other dogs had to maintain their
leadership by many a deadly conflict, but he
quietly assumed it, and invariably his assumption
was left unchallenged; nay, even upon his arrival
at some Hudson Bay fort, some place wherein he
had never before set foot, he was wont to instantly
appoint himself director-general of all the Company’s
dogs, whose days from earliest puppyhood
had been passed within the palisades. I have
often watched him at this work, and marvelled by
what mysterious power he held his sway. I have
seen two or three large dogs flee before a couple of
bounds merely made by him in their direction,
while a certain will-some-one-hold-me-back? kind
of look pervaded his face, as though he was only
prevented from rending his enemy into small
pieces by the restraining influence which the
surface of the ground exercised upon his
legs.</p>
<p>His great weight no doubt carried respect with<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">27</span>
it. At the lazy time of the year he weighed nearly
100 pounds, and his size was in no way diminished
by the immense coat of hair and fine fur which enveloped
him. Had Sir Boyle Roche known this
dog he would not have given to a bird alone the
faculty of being in two places at once, for no mortal
eye could measure the interval between Cerf-vola’s
demolishment of two pieces of dog-meat, or
Pemmican, flung in different directions at the same
moment.</p>
<p>Thus we journeyed on. Sometimes when the
sheen of a lake suggested the evening camp, while
yet the sun was above the horizon, my three
friends would accompany me on a ramble through
the thicket-lined hills. At such times, had any
Indian watched from sedgy shore or bordering
willow copse the solitary wanderer who, with dogs
following close, treaded the lonely lake shore, he
would have probably carried to his brethren a
strange story of the “white man’s medicine.” He
would have averred that he had heard a white man
talking to a big, bushy-tailed dog, somewhere
amidst the Touchwood Hills, and singing to him
a “great medicine song” when the sun went
down.</p>
<p>And if now we reproduce for the reader the
medicine song which the white man strung
together for his bushy-tailed dog, we may perhaps<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">28</span>
forestall some critic’s verdict by prefixing to it
the singularly appropriate title of</p>
<p class="p1 b0 center">DOGGEREL.</p>
<div class="poetry-container p0">
<div class="poetry">
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">And so, old friend, we are met again, companions still to be,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Across the waves of drifted snow, across the prairie sea.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Again we’ll tread the silent lake, the frozen swamp, the fen,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Beneath the snow-crown’d sombre pine we’ll build our camp again:</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And long before the icy dawn, while hush’d all nature lies,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And weird and wan the white lights flash across the northern skies;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Thy place, as in past days thou’lt take, the leader of the train,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To steer until the stars die out above the dusky plain;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Then on, thro’ space by wood and hill, until the wintry day</div>
<div class="verse indent0">In pale gleams o’er the snow-capped ridge has worn itself away,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">And twilight bids us seek the brake, where midst the pines once more</div>
<div class="verse indent0">The fire will gleam before us, the stars will glimmer o’er.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">There stretch’d upon the snow-drift, before the pine log’s glare,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Thy master’s couch and supper with welcome thou wilt share,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">To rest, unless some prowling wolf should keep thee watchful still,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">While lonely through the midnight sounds his wail upon the hill.</div>
</div>
<div class="stanza">
<div class="verse indent0">And when the storm raves around, and thick and blinding snow</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Comes whirling in wild eddies around, above, below;</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Still all unmoved thou’lt keep thy pace as manfully as when</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Thy matchless mettle first I tried in lone Pasquia’s glen.</div>
<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">29</span>
<div class="verse indent0">Thus day by day we’ll pierce the wilds where rolls the Arctic stream,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Where Athabasca’s silent lakes, through whispering pine-trees gleam.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Until, where far Unchagah’s flood by giant cliffs is crown’d,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Thy bells will feed the echoes, long hungering for a sound.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Old dog, they say thou hast no life beyond this earth of ours,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">That toil and truth give thee no place amidst Elysian bowers.</div>
<div class="verse indent0">Ah well, e’en so, I look for thee when all our danger’s past,</div>
<div class="verse indent0">That on some hearth-rug, far at home, thou’lt rest thy limbs at last.</div>
</div></div>
</div>
<p>A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed
with thickets, of treeless waste, and lakes spreading
into unseen declivities, stretches out between
the Qu’Appelle and Saskatchewan rivers.
Roamed over by but few bands of Indians, and
almost bereft of the larger kind of game, whose
bleached bones cover it thickly, this expanse
lies in unbroken solitude for more than three
hundred miles. Through it the great trail to the
north lays its long, winding course; but no other
trace of man is to be found; and over lake and
thicket, hill and waste, broods the loneliness of
the untenanted.</p>
<p>Once it was a famous field of Indian fight, in the
old days when Crees and Assineboine strove for
mastery. Now it has almost lost the tradition of
battle, but now and again a hill-top or a river-course,
whose French or English name faintly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">30</span>
echoes the Indian meaning, tells to the traveller
who cares to look below the surface some story
of fight in bygone times.</p>
<p>The hill of the Wolverine and the lonely
Spathanaw Watchi have witnessed many a deed
of Indian daring and Indian perfidy in days not
long passed away, but these deeds are now forgotten,
for the trader as he unyokes his horses at
their base, and kindles his evening fire, little recks
of such things, and hails the hill-top only as a
landmark on his solitary road.</p>
<p>Alone in a vast waste the Spathanaw Watchi
lifts his head, thickets and lakes are at his base,
a lonely grave at top, around four hundred miles
of horizon; a view so vast that endless space
seems for once to find embodiment, and at a
single glance the eye is satiated with immensity.
There is no mountain range to come up across
the sky-line, no river to lay its glistening folds
along the middle distance, no dark forest to give
shade to foreground or to fringe perspective, no
speck of life, no track of man, nothing but the
wilderness. Reduced thus to its own nakedness,
space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur.
One is suddenly brought face to face with that
enigma which we try to comprehend by giving to
it the names of endless, interminable, measureless;
that dark inanity which broods upon a waste of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">31</span>
moorland at dusk, and in which fancy sees the
spectral and the shadowy.</p>
<div id="i_031" class="figcenter" style="max-width: 41em;">
<ANTIMG src="images/i_031.jpg" width-obs="2563" height-obs="1604" alt="" />
<div class="caption">VIEW FROM THE SPATHANAW WATCHI.</div>
</div>
<p>Yet in this view from the Spathanaw there is
nothing dimly seen; the eye travels to the farthest
distance without one effort of vision, and, reaching
there, rests untired by its long gaze. As the
traveller looks at this wonderful view he stands by
the grave of an Indian, and he sees around him
for four hundred miles the Indian Paradise. It
was from scenes such as this, when the spring
had covered them with greensward, and the wild
herds darkened them by their myriads, that the
shadowy sense of a life beyond the tomb took
shape and form in the Red man’s mind.</p>
<p>It was the 25th of October when I once more
drew near to the South Saskatchewan.</p>
<p>Amidst its high wooded banks the broad river
rippled brightly along, as yet showing no trace of
that winter now so close at hand. Two years
before, all but a few days, I had reached this same
river, then shored by dense masses of ice; and now,
as I looked from the southern shore, the eye had
no little difficulty in tracing through the lingering
foliage of the summer the former point of passage,
where on the cold November morning my favourite
horse had gone down beneath the ice-locked river.</p>
<p>Crossing to the southern shore I turned eastward
through a rich undulating land, and riding<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">32</span>
hard for one day reached the little mission station
of Prince Albert, midway between the Red River
and the Rocky Mountains.</p>
<p>Those who have followed me through former
wanderings may remember a spot where two large
rivers unite after many hundred miles of prairie
wandering, and form one majestic current on the
edge of the Great Northern Forest. To this spot,
known as the “Grand Forks of the Saskatchewan,”
I was now journeying, for there, while the autumn
was yet younger, two friends had preceded me to
build at the point of confluence a hut for our residence
during the early winter.</p>
<p>The evening of the 28th of October found
me pushing hastily through a broad belt of
firs and pines which crosses the tongue of land
between the rivers some ten miles from their junction;
beyond this belt of trees the country opened
out, but, as it finally narrowed to the point of
confluence, the dark pine-clumps, outliers of the
dense Northern Forest, again rose into view. With
these features a previous visit had made me acquainted;
but the night had now closed in ere yet
the fir forest had been passed, and the rain, which
all day had been ceaseless, settled down with darkness
into a still heavier torrent. As we emerged
from the pines my baggage-cart suddenly broke
down, and there only remained the alternative of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">33</span>
camping by the scene of the disaster, or pushing
on for the river junction on foot.</p>
<p>Unfortunately the prospect of unexpectedly
walking in upon my friends, housed in the depths
of the wilderness, amidst the wild rain-storm of
the night, proved too strong a temptation; and
having secured the cart as best we could against
weather and wolves, we set out into the darkness.
For more than an hour we walked hard through
undulating ground intermixed with swamps and
beaver dams, until at length the land began to
decline perceptibly.</p>
<p>Descending thus for nearly a mile we came suddenly
upon a large, quick-running river, whose
waters chafed with sullen noise against boulder-lined
shores, and hissed under the wild beating of
the rain. With cautious steps we groped our
way to the edge and cast a dry branch into the
flood; it floated towards the left; the river, then,
must be the South Saskatchewan. Was the junction
of this river with the northern branch yet
distant? or was it close at hand? for if it was
near, then my home was near too.</p>
<p>Making our way along the shore we held on for
some time, until suddenly there rose before us a
steep bank, at the base of which the current ran
in whirling eddies. To climb up a high bank on
our left, and thus flank this obstacle, next became<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">34</span>
our toil; soon we found ourselves in a dense wood
where innumerable fallen trees lay in endless confusion.
For another hour we groped our way
through this labyrinth in a vain attempt to reach
the upper level, until at last, exhausted by hours
of useless toil, wet, hungry, and bruised, I gave
the reluctant word to camp.</p>
<p>To camp, what a mockery it seemed without
blankets or covering save our rain-soaked clothes,
without food save a few biscuits. The cold rain
poured down through leafless aspens, and shelter
there was none. It was no easy matter to find a
dry match, but at length a fire was made, and from
the surrounding wood we dragged dead trees to
feed the flames. There is no necessity to dwell
upon the miserable hours which ensued! All night
long the rain hissed down, and the fire was powerless
against its drenching torrents. Towards
morning we sunk into a deep sleep, lying stretched
upon the soaking ground.</p>
<p>At last a streak of dawn broke over the high
eastern shore, the light struggled for mastery
with the surrounding darkness and finally prevailed,
and descending to the river showed the
broad current sweeping on to the north-east.
Quitting without regret our cheerless bivouac,
we climbed with stiff limbs the high overhanging
bank, and gained the upper level. Far<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">35</span>
away the river still held its course to the north-east,
deep sunken 300 feet below the prairie level:
we were still distant from the Forks.</p>
<p>Retracing our steps through miles of fallen
timber we reached the cart, but the morning had
worn on to mid-day before our long-wished-for
breakfast smoked in the kettle. Three hours later
on, during an evening which had cleared sufficiently
to allow the sun to glint through cloud rifts
on pine forest and prairie, I reached the lofty
ridge which overlooks the Forks of the Saskatchewan.</p>
<hr />
<div id="toclink_36" class="chapter">
<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">36</span></p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />
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