don't feel that I can go."

It was still possible, however, that at the Mountain House I might find
a guide ready to attempt the journey, and my kind host at Edmonton
provided me with letters to facilitate my procuring all supplies from his
subordinate officer at that station. Thus fully accoutred and prepared to
meet the now rapidly increasing severity of the winter, I started on the
1st December for the mountains. It-was a bright, beautiful day. I was
alone with my two retainers; before me lay an uncertain future, but so
many curious scenes had been passed in safety during the last six months
of my life, that I recked little of what was before me, drawing a kind of
blind confidence from the thought that so much could not have been in
vain. Crossing the now fast-frozen Saskatchewan, we ascended the southern
bank and entered upon a rich country watered with many streams and
wooded with park-like clumps of aspen and pine. My two retainers were
first-rate fellows. One spoke English very fairly: he was a brother of
the bright-eyed little beauty at Fort Pitt. The other, Paul Foyale, was a
thick, stout-set man, a good voyageur, and excellent-in camp. Both were
noted travellers, and both had suffered severely in the epidemic of the
small-pox. Paul had lost his wife and child, and Rowland's children had
all had the disease, but had recovered. As for any idea about taking
infection from men coming out of places where that infection existed,
that would have been the merest foolishness; at least, Paul and Rowland
thought so, and as they were destined to be my close companions for some
days, cooking for me, tying up my blankets, and sleeping beside me, it
was just as well to put a good face upon the matter and trust once more
to the glorious doctrine of chance. Besides, they were really such good
fellows, princes among voyayeurs, that, small-pox or no small-pox, they
were first-rate company for any ordinary mortal. For two days we jogged
merrily along. The Musquashis or Bears Hill rose before us and faded away
into blue distance behind us. After sundown on the 2nd we camped in a
thicket of large aspens by the high bank of the Battle River, the same
stream at whose mouth nearly 400 miles away I had found the Crees a
fortnight before. On the 3rd December we crossed this river, and,
quitting the Blackfeet trail, struck in a south-westerly direction
through a succession of grassy hills with partially wooded valleys and
small frozen la