like a group of dogs came down
to the bank, watched the boatmen land, and loped off. These were coyotes
of the prairie. Again and again as the brigades drew in for nooning to
the lee side of some willow-grown island, black-tailed deer leaped out
of the brush almost over their heads, and at one bound were in the midst
of a tangled thicket that opened a magic way for their flight. From
Hendry's winter camp to Lake Winnipeg, a distance of almost a thousand
miles, a good hunter could then, as now, keep himself in food summer and
winter with but small labour.

Most people have a mental picture of the plains country as flat prairie,
with sluggish, winding rivers. Such a picture would not be true of the
Saskatchewan. From end to end of the river, for only one interval is the
course straight enough and are the banks low enough to enable the
traveller to see in a line for eight miles. The river is a continual
succession of half-circles, hills to the right, with the stream curving
into a shadowy lake, or swerving out again in a bend to the low left; or
high-walled sandstone bluffs to the left sending the water wandering out
to the low silt shore on the right. Not river of the Thousand Islands,
like the St Lawrence, but river of Countless Islands, the Saskatchewan
should be called.

More ideal hunting ground could not be found. The hills here are partly
wooded and in the valleys nestle lakes literally black with
wild-fowl--bittern that rise heavy-winged and furry with a boo-m-m; grey
geese holding political caucus with raucous screeching of the honking
ganders; black duck and mallard and teal; inland gulls white as snow and
fearless of hunters; little match-legged phalaropes fishing gnats from
the wet sand.

The wildest of the buffalo hunts used to take place along this section
of the river, or between what are now known as Pitt and Battleford. It
was a common trick of the eternally warring Blackfeet and Cree to lie in
hiding among the woods here and stampede all horses, or for the
Blackfeet to set canoes adrift down the river or scuttle the teepees of
the frightened Cree squaws who waited at this point for their lords'
return from the Bay.

Round that three-hundred mile bend in the river known as 'the Elbow' the
water is wide and shallow, with such numbers of sand-bars and shallows
and islands that one is lost trying to keep the main current. Shallow
water sounds safe and easy for canoeing, but duststorms and wind make
the