there ever was such a thing as summer
heat, summer scents, summer sounds, or summer skies. The first thaw is
therefore like the glad, unexpected meeting of a dear old friend; and
the trumpet voice of the first goose, the whirring wing of the first
duck, and the whistle of the first plover, sounds like the music of the
spheres to one's long unaccustomed ears. Then the trickle of water
gives one something like a new sensation. It may be but a thread of
liquid no thicker than a pipe-stem faintly heard by an attentive ear
tinkling in the cold depths far under the ice or snow, but it is liquid,
not solid, water. It is suggestive of motion. It had almost been
forgotten as a sound of the long past which had forsaken the terrestrial
ball for ever.

It does not take a powerful imagination to swell a tiny stream to a
rivulet, a river, a lake, a mighty ocean. Shut your eyes for a moment,
and, in memory, the ice and snow vanish; the streams flow as in the days
of old; flowers come again to gladden the eyes and--but why trouble you,
good reader, with all this? We feel, sadly, that unless you have tasted
the northern winter no description, however graphic, will enable you to
drink in the spirit of the northern spring.

About this time Okematan, the Cree chief, took it into his head that he
would go a-hunting.

This last word does not suggest to a dweller in the wilderness that
crossing of ploughed lands on horseback, and leaping of hedges,
etcetera, which it conveys to the mind of an Englishman. The Cree
chief's notion of spring-hunting was, getting into a birch-bark canoe,
with or without a comrade, and going forth on the lakes and rivers of
the wilderness with plenty of powder and shot, to visit the native home
of the wild-goose, the wild-duck, the pelican, the plover, and the swan.

For such a trip not much is essential. Besides the gun and ammunition
referred to, Okematan carried a blanket, a hatchet, several extra pairs
of moccasins, a tin kettle in which to boil food, a fire-bag for steel,
flint, and tinder, with a small supply of tobacco.

On hearing of his intention, Dan Davidson resolved to accompany him.
Dan had by that time associated so much with the chief that he had
learned to speak his language with facility. Indeed nearly all the
settlers who had a turn for languages had by that time acquired a
smattering more or less of Indian and French.

"You see," said Dan to the chief, "there is not much doing on