f nature and of night, made
accessions full as fitting, as all the muffled music and craped sorrow of
church and city.

At Cumberland I beheld for the first time a genuine train of dogs. There
was no mistake about them in shape or form, from fore-goer to hindermost
hauler. Two of them were the pure Esquimaux breed, the bush-tailed,
fox-headed, long-furred, clean-legged animals whose ears, sharp-pointed
and erect, sprung from a head embedded in thick tufts of woolly hair;
Pomeranians multiplied by four; the other two were a curious compound of
Esquimaux and Athabascan, with hair so long that eyes were scarcely
'visible. I had suffered so long from the wretched condition and
description of the dogs of the Hudson Bay Company, that I determined to
become the possessor of those animals, and, although I had to pay
considerably more than had ever been previously demanded as the price of
a train of dogs in the North, I was still glad, to get them at any
figure. Five hundred miles yet lay between me and Red River-five hundred
miles of marsh and frozen lakes, the delta of the Saskatchewan and the
great Lakes Winnipegoosis and Manitoba.

It was the last day of January when I got away from Cumberland with this
fine train of dogs and another 2 serviceable set which belonged to a
Swampy Indian named Bear, who had agreed to accompany me to Red River.
Bear was the son of the old man whose evolutions with the three pegs had
caused so much commotion among the Indians at Red River on the occasion
of my visit to Fort Garry eight months earlier. He was now to be my close
companion during many days and nights, and it may not be out of place
here to anticipate the verdict of three weeks, and to award him as a
voyageur, snow-shoer and camp-maker a place second to none in the long
list of my employees. Soon after quitting Cumberland we struck the
Saskatchewan River, and, turning eastward along it, entered the great
region of marsh and swamp. During five days our course lay through vast
expanses of stiff frozen reeds, whose corn-like stalks rattled harshly
against the parchment sides of the cariole as the dog-trains wound along
through their snow-covered roots. Bleak and dreary beyond expression
stretched this region of frozen swamp for fully 100 miles. The cold
remained all the time at about the same degree--20 below zero. The camps
were generally poor and miserable ones. Stunted willow is the chief
timber of the region, and fortunate did we d