and his descriptions of his adventures in the Wild North
Land and its wonderful scenery charm by their eloquence
and poetic beauty.

It was late in the month of September, 1872, when, after a summer of
travel in Canada and the United States, I drew near the banks of the Red
River of the North. Two years had worked many changes in scene and
society. A "city" stood on the spot where, during a former visit, a
midnight storm had burst upon me in the then untenanted prairie.
Representative institutions had been established in the new province of
Manitoba. Civilisation had developed itself in other ways, but amidst
these changes of scene and society there was one thing still unchanged
on the confines of the Red River. Close to the stream of Frog's Point an
old friend met me with many tokens of recognition. It was my Esquimaux
dog, Cerf-Vola, who had led my train from Cumberland on the lower
Saskatchewan, across the ice of the Great Lakes. To become the owner of
this old friend again and of his new companions, Spanker and Pony, was a
work of necessity.

In the earliest days of October all phases of civilisation were passed
with little regret, and at the Rat Creek, near the southern shore of
Lake Manitoba, I bade good-bye to society, pushed on to the Hudson Bay
Company's post of Beaver Creek, from which point, with one man, three
horses, three dogs, and all the requisites of food, arms and raiment, I
started on October 14 for the North-west. I was virtually alone. My only
human associate was a worthless half-breed taken at chance. But I had
other companions. A good dog is so much more a nobler beast than an
indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of the
one for that of the other; and Cerf-Vola was that dog.

A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of
treeless wastes and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches
from between the Qu'-Appelle to the Saskatchewan rivers. Through it the
great trail to the North lays its long, winding course, and over it
broods the loneliness of the untenanted. Alone in the vast waste Mount
Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head; a lonely grave at top; around 400 miles
of horizon. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with
almost terrible grandeur. It was October 25 when I once more drew near
the South Saskatchewan, and crossing to the southern shore I turned
eastward through a rich undulating land, and made for the Grand Forks