I was ninety miles from Fort Garry, and as yet no tidings of the
Expedition.

A man may journey very far through the lone spaces of the earth without
meeting with another Winnipeg River. In it nature has contrived to place
her two great units of earth and water in strange and wild combinations.
To say that the Winnipeg River has an immense volume of water, that it
descends 360 feet in a distance of 160 miles, that it is full of eddies
and whirlpools, of every variation of waterfall from chutes to cataracts,
that it expands into lonely pine edged lakes and far-reaching
island-studded bays, that its bed is cumbered with immense wave-polished
rocks, that its vast solitudes are silent and its cascades ceaselessly
active--to say all this is but to tell in bare items of fact the
narrative of its beauty. For the Winnipeg by the multiplicity of its
perils and the ever-changing beauty of its character, defies the
description of civilized men as it defies the puny efforts of civilized
travel. It seems part of the savage-fitted alone for him and for his
ways, useless to carry the burden of man's labour, but useful to shelter
the wild things of wood and water which dwell in its waves and along its
shores. And the red man who steers his little birch-bark canoe through
the foaming rapids of the Winnipeg, how well he knows its various ways!
To him it seems to possess life and instinct, he speaks of it as one
would of a high-mettled charger which will do any thing if he be rightly
handled. It gives him his test of superiority, his proof of courage. To
shoot the Otter Falls or the Rapids of the Barriere, to carry his canoe
down the whirling eddies of Portage-de-l'Isle, to lift her from the rush
of water at the Seven Portages, or launch her by the edge of the
whirlpool below the Chute-a-Jocko, all this is to be a brave and a
skilful Indian, for the man who can do all this must possess a power in
the sweep of his paddle, a quickness of glance, and a quiet consciousness
of skill, not to be found except after generations of practice. For
hundreds of years the Indian has lived amidst these rapids; they have
been the playthings of his boyhood, the realities of his life, the
instinctive habit of his old age. What the horse is to the Arab, what the
dog is to the Esquimaux, what the camel is to those who journey across
Arabian deserts, so is the canoe to the Ojibbeway. Yonder wooded shore
yields him from first to last the materials-he requires f