of
the Saskatchewan, which we reached in the last days of October.

It is difficult to imagine a wilder scene than that presented from the
tongue of land which rises over the junction of the North and South
Saskatchewan rivers. One river has travelled through 800 miles of rich
rolling landscape; the other has run its course of 900 miles through
arid solitudes. Both have their sources in mountain summits where the
avalanche thundered forth to solitude the tiding of their birth.

_II.--The Twin Dwellers of the Prairie_

At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of these two
rivers was a winter hut built by two friends who proposed to accompany
me part of the long journey I meant to take into the Wild North Land.
Our winter stock of meat had first to be gathered in, and we accordingly
turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. The snow had begun to
fall in many storms, and the landscape was wrapped in its winter mantle.
The buffalo were 200 miles distant on the Great Prairie. Only two wild
creatures have made this grassy desert their home--the Indian and the
bison. Of the origin of the strange, wild hunter, the keen untutored
scholar of Nature, who sickens beneath our civilisation, and dies amidst
our prosperity, fifty writers have broached various theories; but to me
it seems that he is of an older and more remote race than our own--a
stock coeval with a shadowy age, a remnant of an earlier creation which
has vanished from the earth, preserved in these wilds.

As to the other wild creatures who have made their dwelling on the Great
Prairie, the millions and millions of dusky bison, during whose
migration from the Far South to the Far North the earth trembled
beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep, bellowing of
their unnumbered throats, no one can tell their origin. Before the
advent of the white man these twin dwellers on the Great Prairie are
fast disappearing.

It was mid-November before we reached the buffalo, and it was on
December 3, having secured enough animals to make the needful
pemmican--a hard mixture of fat and dried buffalo meat pounded down into
a solid mass--for our long journey, that, with thin and tired horses, we
returned to the Forks of the Saskatchewan. The cold had set in unusually
early, and even in mid-November the thermometer had fallen to thirty
degrees below zero, and unmittened fingers in handling the rifle became
frozen. During the sixteen days in whi