Here for three-fourths of the year
the sun is feeble, and the aspect that of winter. For months the cold
waters are bound up in an icy embrace. The earth is covered with thick
snow, over which rise the needle-leafed _coniferae_--the pines, the
cedars, the spruce, and the hemlock. Very unlike each other are the
countries watered by the two streams, the Red River of the South and its
namesake of the North.

But whither go our Boy Hunters in their birch-bark canoe? The river
upon which they are _voyaging_ runs due northward into the great Lake
Winnipeg. They are floating with its current, and consequently
increasing the distance from their home. Whither go they?

The answer leads us to some sad reflections. Our joy on again beholding
them is to be mingled with grief. When we last saw them they had a
father, but no mother. Now they have neither one nor the
other. The old Colonel, their father--the French _emigre_, the
_hunter-naturalist_--is dead. He who had taught them all they knew, who
had taught them "to ride, to swim, to dive deep rivers, to fling the
lasso, to climb tall trees, and scale steep cliffs, to bring down birds
upon the wing or beasts upon the run, with the arrow and the unerring
rifle; who had trained them to sleep in the open air, in the dark
forest, on the unsheltered prairie, along the white snow-wreath--
anywhere--with but a blanket or a buffalo-robe for their bed; who had
taught them to live on the simplest food, and had imparted to one of
them a knowledge of science, of botany in particular, that enabled them,
in case of need, to draw sustenance from plants and trees, from roots
and fruits, to find resources where ignorant men would starve; had
taught them to kindle a fire without flint, steel, or detonating powder;
to discover their direction without a compass, from the rocks and the
trees and the signs of the heavens; and in addition to all, had taught
them, as far as was then known, the geography of that vast wilderness
that stretches from the Mississippi to the shores of the Pacific Ocean,
and northward to the icy borders of the Arctic Sea"--he who had taught
them all this, their father, was no more; and his three sons, the "boy
men," of whom he was so proud, and of whose accomplishments he was wont
to boast, were now orphans upon the wide world.

But little more than a year after their return from their grand
expedition to the Texan prairies, the "old Colonel" had died. It was
one