ng
for the night. He fed and lodged himself and he carried me--all he asks
in return was a water-hole in the frozen lake, and that I cut for him.
Sometimes the night came down upon us still in the midst of a great open
treeless plain, without shelter, water, or grass, and then we would
continue on in the inky darkness as though our march was to last
eternally, and poor Blackie would step out as if his natural state was
one of perpetual motion. On the 4th November we rode over sixty miles;
and when at length the camp was made in the lea of a little clump of bare
willows, the snow was lying cold upon the prairies, and Blackie and his
comrades went out to shiver through their supper in the bleakest scene my
eyes had ever looked upon.

About midway between Fort Ellice and Carlton a sudden and well-defined
change occurs in the character of the country; the light soil disappears,
and its place is succeeded by a rich dark loam covered deep in grass and
vetches. Beautiful hills swell in slopes more or less abrupt on all
sides, while lakes fringed with thickets and clumps of good-sized poplar
balsam lie lapped in their fertile hollows.

This region bears the name of the Touchwood Hills. Around it, far into
endless space, stretch immense plains of bare and scanty vegetation,
plains seared with the tracks of countless buffalo which, until a few
years ago, were wont to roam in vast herds between the Assineboine and
the Saskatchewan. Upon whatever side the eye turns when crossing these
great expanses, the same wrecks of the monarch of the prairie lie
thickly strewn over the surface. Hundreds of thousands of skeletons dot
the short scant grass; and when fire has laid barer still the level
surface, the bleached ribs and skulls of long-killed bison whiten far and
near the dark burnt prairie. There is something unspeakably melancholy in
the aspect of this portion of the North-west. From one of the westward
jutting spurs of the Touchwood Hills the eye sees far away over an
immense plain; the sun goes down, and as he sinks upon the earth the
straight line of the horizon becomes visible for a moment across this
blood red disc, but so distant, so far away, that it seems dream like in
its immensity. There is not a sound in the air or on the earth; on every
side lie spread the relics of the great fight waged by man against the
brute creation: all is silent and deserted--the Indian and the buffalo
gone, the settler not yet come. You turn quic