ch we traversed the Great Prairie
on our return journey we had not seen one human being moving over it.
The picture of desolation was complete.

When the year was drawing to its close, two Cree Indians pitched their
lodge on the opposite side of the North Saskatchewan and afforded us not
a little food for amusement in the long winter evenings. In the Red
Man's mental composition there is mixed up much simplicity and cunning,
close reasoning, and child-like suspicion, much natural quickness, sense
of humour, credulousness, power of observation, faith and fun and
selfishness.

Preparations had been made for my contemplated journey to the frozen
North. I only waited the arrival of the winter packet which was to be
carried 3,000 miles to distant stations of the Hudson Bay Company. A
score of different dog teams had handled it; it had camped more than 100
nights in the Great Northern forests; but the Indian postman, with dogs
and mail, had disappeared in a water-hole in the Saskatchewan river. On
February 3, therefore, I set out with my dog team, but without letters.

Two days afterwards we came to Carlton Fort, where there was a great
gathering of "agents" from all the forts of the Hudson Bay Company in
the north and west, many of them 2,000 miles distant, and one 4,000
miles. These "agents," or "winterers," as they are sometimes called,
have to face for a long season hardship, famine, disease, and a rigorous
climate. God knows their lives are hard. They hail generally from the
remote isles or highlands of Scotland. The routine of their lives is to
travel on foot a thousand miles in winter's darkest time, to live upon
the coarsest food, to feel cold such as Englishmen in England cannot
even comprehend, often to starve, always to dwell in exile from the
great world. Perchance, betimes, the savage scene is lost in a dreamy
vision of some lonely Scottish loch, some Druid mound in far-away Lewis,
some vista of a fireside, when storm howled and waves ran high on the
beach at Stornoway.

_III.--The Frozen Trail_

It was brilliant moonlight on February 11 when we left Fort Carlton, and
days of rapid travel carried us far to the north into the great
sub-Arctic forest, a line of lakes forming its rampart of defence
against the wasting fires of the prairie region. The cold was so intense
that, at mid-day with the sun shining, the thermometer stood at 26
degrees below zero. Right in our teeth blew the bitter blast; the dogs,
w