CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
The Red Man--Leave Battle River--The Red Deer Hills--A long Ride--Fort Pitt--The Plague--Hauling by the Tail--A pleasant Companion--An easy Method of Divorce--Reach Edmonton.
EVER, towards the setting sun drifts the flow of Indian migration; ever nearer and nearer to that glorious range of snow-clad peaks which the red man has so aptly named "the Mountains of the Setting Sun." It is a mournful task to trace back through the long list of extinct tribes the history of this migration. Turning over the leaves of books belonging to that "old colonial time" of which Longfellow speaks, we find strange names of Indian tribes now utterly unknown, meetings of council and treaty making with Mohawks and Oneidas and Tuscaroras.
They are gone, and scarcely a trace remains of them. Others have left in lake and mountain-top the record of their names. Erie and Ottawa, Seneca and Cayuga tell of forgotten or almost forgotten nations which a century ago were great and powerful. But never at any time since first the white man was welcomed on the newly-discovered shores of the Western Continent by his red brother, never has such disaster and destruction overtaken these poor wild, wandering sons of nature as at the moment in which we write. Of yore it was the pioneers of France, England, and Spain with whom they had to contend, but now the whole white world is leagued in bitter strife against the Indian. The American and Canadian are only names that hide beneath them the greed of united Europe. Terrible deeds have been wrought out in that western land; terrible heart-sickening deeds of cruelty and rapacious infamy--have been, I say? no, are to this day and hour, and never perhaps more sickening than now in the full blaze of nineteenth-century civilization. If on the long line of the American frontier, from the Gulf of Mexico to the British boundary, a Single life is taken by an Indian, if even a horse or ox be stolen from a settler, the fact is chronicled in scores of-journals throughout the United States, but the reverse of the story we never know. The countless deeds of perfidious robbery, of ruthless murder done by white savages out in these Western wilds never find the light of day. The poor red man has no telegraph, no newspaper, no type, to tell his sufferings and his woes. My God, what a terrible tale could I not tell of these dark deeds done by the white savage against the far nobler red man! From southernmost Texas to most northern Montana there is but one universal remedy for Indian difficulty--kill him. Let no man tell me that such is not the case. I answer, I have heard it hundreds of times: "Never trust a redskin unless he be dead." "Kill every buffalo you see," said a Yankee colonel to me one day in Nebraska; "every buffalo dead is an Indiaan gone;" such things are only trifles. Listen to this cute feat of a Montana trader. A store-keeper in Helena City had some sugar stolen from him. He poisoned the sugar next night and left his door open. In the morning six Indians were found dead outside the town. That was a cute notion, I guess; and yet there are other examples worse than that, but they are too revolting to tell. Never mind; I suppose they have found record somewhere else if not in this world, and in one shape or another they will speak in due time. The Crees are perhaps the only tribe of prairie Indians who have as yet suffered no injustice at the hands of the white man. The land is still theirs, the hunting-rounds remain almost undisturbed; but their days are numbered, and already the echo of the approaching wave of Western immigration is sounding through the solitudes of the Cree country.
It is the same story from the Atlantic to the Pacific. First the White man was the welcome guest, the honoured visitor; then the greedy hunter, the death-dealing vender of fire-water and poison; then the settler and exterminator--every where it has been the same story.
This wild man who first welcomed the new-comer is the only perfect socialist or communist in the world. He holds all things in common with his tribe--the land, the bison, the river, and the moose. He is starving, and the rest of the tribe want food. Well, he kills a moose, and to the last bit the coveted food is shared by all. That war-party has taken one hundred horses in the last raid into Blackfoot or Peagin territory; well, the whole tribe are free to help themselves to the best and fleetest steeds before the captors will touch one out of the band. There is but a scrap of beaver, a thin rabbit, or a bit of sturgeon in the lodge; a stranger comes, and he is hungry; give him his share and let him be first served and best attended to. If one child starves in an Indian camp you may know that in every lodge scarcity is universal and that every stomach is hungry. Poor, poor fellow! his virtues are all his own; crimes he may have, and plenty, but his noble traits spring from no book-learning, from no school-craft, from the preaching of no pulpit; they come from the instinct of good which the Great Spirit has taught him; they are the whisperings from that lost world whose glorious shores beyond the Mountains of the Setting Sun are the long dream of his life. The most curious anomaly among the race of man, the red man of America, is passing away beneath our eyes into the infinite solitude. The possession of the same noble qualities which we affect to reverence among our nations makes us kill him. If he would be as the African or the Asiatic it would be all right for him; if he would be our slave he might live, but as he won't be that, won't toil and delve and hew for us, and will persist in hunting, fishing, and roaming over the beautiful prairie land which the Great Spirit gave him; in a word, since he will be free we kill him. Why do I call this wild child the great anomaly of the human race? I will tell you. Alone amongst savage tribes he has learnt the lesson which the great mother Nature teaches to her sons through the voices of the night, the forest, and the solitude. This river, this mountain, this measureless meadow speak to him in a language of their own. Dwelling with them, he learns their varied tongues, and his speech becomes the echo of the beauty that lies spread around him. Every name for lake or river, for mountain or meadow, has its peculiar significance, and to tell the Indian title of such things is generally to tell the nature of them also. Ossian never spoke with the voice of the mist-shrouded mountain or the wave-beat shores of the isles more thoroughly than does this chief of the Blackfeet or the Sioux speak the voices of the things of earth and air amidst which his wild life is cast.
I know that it is the fashion to hold in derision and mockery the idea that nobility, poetry, or eloquence exist in the wild Indian. I know that with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to call Napoleon the Corsican robber--I know that that same instinct glories in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to slavery; glories in painting him devoid of every trait of manhood, worthy only to share the fate of the wild beast of the wilderness--to be shot down mercilessly when seen. But those bright spirits who have redeemed the America of to-day from the dreary waste of vulgar greed and ignorant conceit which we in Europe have flung so heavily upon her; those men whose writings have come back across the Atlantic, and have become as household words among us--Irving, Cooper, Longfellow--have they not found in the rich store of Indian poetry the source of their choicest thought? Nay, I will go farther, because it may be said that the a poet would be prone to drape with poetry every subject on which his fancy lighted, as the sun turns to gold and crimson the dullest and the dreariest clouds: but Search the books of travel amongst remote Indian tribes, from Columbus to Catlin, from Charlevoix to Carver, from Bonneville to Pallisser the story is ever the same. The traveller is welcomed and made much of; he is free to come and go; the best food is set before him; the lodge is made warm and bright; he is welcome to stay his lifetime if he pleases. "I swear to your majesties," writes Columbus--alas! the red man's greatest enemy--"I swear to your majesties that there is not in the world a better people than these, more affectionate, affable, or mild."
"At this moment," writes an American officer only ten years back, "it is certain a man can go about throughout the Blackfoot territory without molestation, except in the contingency of being mistaken at night for an Indian." No, they are-fast going, and soon they will be all gone, but in after-times men will judge more justly the poor wild creatures whom to-day we kill and vilify; men will go back again to those old books of travel, or to those pages of "Hiawatha" and "Mohican," to find that far away from the border-land of civilization the wild red man, if more of the savage, was infinitely less of the brute than was the white ruffian who destroyed him.
I quitted the camp at Battle River on the 17th November, with a large band of horses and a young Cree brave who had volunteered his services for some reason of his own which he did not think necessary to impart to us. The usual crowd of squaws, braves in buffalo robes, naked children, and howling dogs assembled to see us start. The Cree led the way mounted on a ragged-looking pony, then came the baggage-sleds, and I brought up the rear on a tall horse belonging to the Company. Thus we held our way in a north-west direction over high-rolling plains along the north bank of the Saskatchewan towards Fort Pitt.
On the morning of the 18th we got away from our camping thicket of poplars long before the break of day. There was no track to guide us, but the Cree went straight as an arrow over hill and dale and frozen lake. The hour that preceded the dawn was brilliant with the flash and glow of meteors across the North-western sky. I lagged so far behind to watch them that when day broke I found myself alone, miles from the party. The Cree kept the pace so well that it took me some hours before I again Caught sight of them. After a hard ride of six-and-thirty miles, we halted for dinner on the banks of English Creek. Close beside our camping-place a large clump of spruce-pine stood in dull contrast to the snowy surface. They looked like old friends to me--friends of the Winnipeg and the now distant Lake of the Woods; for from Red River to English Creek, a distance of 750 miles, I-had seen but a solitary pine-tree. After a short dinner We resumed our rapid way, forcing the pace with a view of making Fort Pitt by night-fall. A French half-breed declared he knew a short cut across the hills of the Red Deer, a wild rugged tract of country lying on the north of the Saskatchewan. Crossing these hills, he said, we would strike the river at their farther side, and then, passing over on the ice, cut the bend which the Saskatchewan makes to the north, and, emerging again opposite Fort Pitt, finally re-cross the river at that station. So much for the plan, and now for its fulfilment.
We entered the region of the Red Deer Hills at about two o'clock in the afternoon, and continued at a very rapid pace in a westerly direction for three hours. As we proceeded the country became more broken, the hills rising steeply from narrow V-shaped valleys, and the ground in many places covered with fallen and decaying trees--the wrecks of fire and tempest. Every where throughout this wild region lay the antlers and heads of moose and elk; but, with the exception of an occasional large jackass-rabbit, nothing living moved through the silent hills. The ground was free from badger-holes; the day, though dark, was fine; and, with a good horse under me, that two hours gallop over, the Red Deer Hills was glorious work. It wanted yet an hour of sunset when we came suddenly upon the Saskatchewan flowing in a deep narrow valley between steep and lofty hills, which were bare of trees and bushes and clear of snow. A very wild desolate scene it looked as I surveyed it from a projecting spur upon whose summit I rested my blown horse. I was now far in advance of the party who occupied a parallel ridge behind me. By signs they intimated that our course now lay to the north; in fact, Daniel had steered very much too ar south, and we had struck the Saskatchewan river a long, distance below the intended place of crossing. Away we went again to the north, soon losing sight of the party; but as I kept the river on my left far below in the valley I knew they could not cross without my being aware of it. Just before sun set they appeared again in sight, making signs that they were about to descend into the valley and to cross the river. The valley here was five hundred feet in depth, the slope being one of the steepest I had ever seen. At the bottom of this steep descent the Saskatchewan lay in its icy bed, a large majestic-looking river three hundred yards in width. We crossed on the ice without accident, and winding up the steep southern shore gained the level plateau above. The sun was going down, right on our forward track. In the deep valley below the Cree and an English half-breed were getting the horses and baggage-sleds over the river. We made signs to them to camp in the valley, and we ourselves turned our tired horses towards the west, determined at all hazards to reach the fort that night. The Frenchman led the way riding, the Hudson Bay officer followed in a horse-sled, I brought up the rear on horseback. Soon it got quite dark, and we held on over a rough and bushless plateau seamed with deep gullies into which we descended at hap hazard forcing our weary horses with difficulty up the opposite sides. The night got later and later, and still no sign of Fort Pitt; riding in rear I was able to mark the course taken by our guide, and it soon struck me that he was steering wrong; our correct course lay west, but he seemed to be heading gradually to the North, and finally, began to veer even towards the East. I called out to the Hudson Bay man that I had serious doubts as to Daniel's knowledge of the track, but I was assured that all was correct. Still we went on, and still no sign of fort or river. At length the Frenchman suddenly pulled Up and asked us to halt while he rode on and surveyed the country, because he had lost the track, and didn't know where he had got to. Here was a pleasant prospect! without food, fire, or covering, out on the bleak plains, with the thermometer at 20 degrees of frost! After some time the Frenchman returned and declared that he had altogether lost his way, and that there was nothing for it but to camp where we were, and wait for daylight to proceed. I looked around in the darkness. The ridge on which we stood was bare and bleak, with the snow drifted off into the valleys. A few miserable stunted willows were the only signs of vegetation, and the wind whistling through their ragged branches made up as dismal a prospect as man could look at. I certainly felt in no very amiable mood with the men who had brought me into this predicament, because I had been overruled in the matter of leaving our baggage behind and in the track we had been pursuing. My companion, however, accepted the situation with apparent resignation, and I saw him commence to unharness his horse from the sled with the aspect of a man who thought a bare hill-top without food, fire, or clothes was the normal state of happiness to which a man might reasonably aspire at the close of an eighty-mile march, with out laying himself open to the accusation of being over effeminate.
Watching this for some seconds in silence, I determined to shape for myself a different course. I dismounted, and taking from the sled a shirt made of deer-skin, mounted again my poor weary horse and turned off alone into the darkness. "Where are you going to?" I heard my companions calling out after me. I was half inclined not to answer, but turned in the saddle and holloaed back, "To Fort Pitt, that's all." I heard behind me a violent bustle, as though they were busily engaged in yoking up the horses again, and then I rode off as hard as my weary horse could go. My friends took a very short time to harness up again, and they were soon powdering along through the wilderness. I kept on for about half an hour, steering by the stars due west; suddenly I came out upon the edge of a deep valley, and by the broad white band beneath recognized the frozen Saskatchewan again. I have at least found the river, and Fort Pitt, we knew, lay somewhere upon the bank. Turning away from the river, I held on in a south-westerly direction for a considerable distance, passing up along a bare snow-covered valley and crossing a high ridge at its end. I could hear my friends behind in the dark. But they had got, I think, a notion that I had taken leave of my senses, and they were afraid to call out to me. After a bit I bent my course again to the west, and steering by my old guides, the stars, those truest and most unchanging friends of the wanderer, I once more struck the Saskatchewan, this time descending to its level and crossing it on the ice.
As I walked along, leading my horse, I must admit to experiencing a sensation not at all pleasant. The memory of the crossing of the South Branch was still too strong to admit of over-confidence in the strength of the ice, and as every now and again my tired horse broke through the upper crust of snow and the ice beneath cracked, as it always will when weight is placed on it for the first time, no matter how strong it may be, I felt by no means as comfortable as I would have wished. At last the long river was passed, and there on the opposite shore lay the cart track to Fort Pitt. We were close to Pipe-stone Creek, and only three miles from the Fort.
It was ten o'clock when we reached the closely-barred gate of this Hudson Bay post, the inhabitants of which had gone to bed. Ten o'clock at night, and we had started at six o'clock in the morning. I had been fifteen hours in the saddle, and no less than ninety miles had passed under my horse's hoofs, but so accustomed had I grown to travel that I felt just as ready to set out again as though only twenty miles had been traversed. The excitement of the last few hours steering by the stars in an unknown country, and its most successful denouement, had put fatigue and weariness in the background; and as we sat down to a well-cooked supper of buffalo steaks and potatoes, with the brightest eyed little lassie, half Cree, half Scotch, in the North-west to wait upon us, while a great fire of pine wood blazed and crackled on the open hearth, I couldn't help saying to my companions, "Well, this is better than your hill-top and the fireless bivouac in the rustling willows."
Fort Pitt was free from small-pox, but it had gone through a fearful ordeal: more than one hundred Crees had perished close around its stockades. The unburied dead lay for days by the road-side, till the wolves, growing bold with the impunity which death among the hunters ever gives to the hunted, approached and fought over the decay ing bodies. From a spot many marches to the south the Indians had come to the fort in midsummer, leaving behind them a long track of dead and dying men over the waste of distance. "Give us help," they cried, "give us help, our medicine-men can do nothing against this plague; from the white man We got it, and it is only the white man who can take it away from us."
But there was no help to be given, and day by day the wretched band grew less. Then came another idea into the red man's brain: "If we can only give this disease to the white man and the trader in the fort," thought they, "we will cease to suffer from it ourselves;" so they came into the houses dying and disfigured as they were, horrible beyond description to look at, and sat down in the entrances of the wooden houses, and stretched themselves on the floors and spat upon the door-handles. It was no use, the fell disease held them in a grasp from which there was no escape, and just six weeks before my arrival the living remnant fled away in despair.
Fort Pitt stands on the left or north shore of the Saskatchewan River, which is here more than four hundred yards in width. On the opposite shore immense bare, bleak hills raise their wind-swept heads seven hundred feet above the river level. A few pine-trees show their tops some distance away to the north, but no other trace of wood is to be seen in that vast amphitheatre of dry grassy hill in which the fort is built. It is a singularly wild-looking scene, not without a certain beauty of its own, but difficult of association with the idea of disease orepidemic, so pure and bracing is the air which sweeps over those great grassy uplands.
On the 20th November I left Fort Pitt, having exchanged some tired horses for fresher ones, but still keeping the same steed for the saddle, as nothing, better could be procured from the band at the fort. The snow had now almost disappeared from the ground, and a Red River cart was once more taken into use for the baggage. Still keeping along the north shore of the Saskatchewan, we now held our way towards the station of Victoria, a small half-breed settlement situated at the most northerly bend which the Saskatchewan makes in its long course from the mountains to Lake Winnipeg. The order of march was ever the same; the Cree, wrapped in a loose blanket, with his gun balanced across the shoulder of his pony, jogged on in front, then came a young half-breed named Batte notte, who will be better known perhaps to the English reader when I say that he was the son of the Assineboine guide who conducted Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle through the pine forests of the Thompson River. This youngster employed himself by continually shouting the name of the horse he was driving--thus "Rouge!" would be vigorously yelled out by his tongue, and Rouge at the same moment would be vigorously belaboured by his whip; "Noir!" he would again shout, when that most ragged animal would be within the shafts; and as Rouge and Noir invariably had this ejaculation of their respective titles coupled with the descent of the whip upon their respective backs, it followed that after a while the mere mention of the name conveyed to the animal the sensation of being licked. One horse, rejoicing in the title of "Jean l'Hereux," seemed specially selected for this mode of treatment. He was a brute of surpassing obstinacy, but, as he bore the name of his former owner, a French semi-clerical maniac who had fled from Canada and joined the Blackfeet, and who was regarded by the Crees as one of their direst foes, I rather think that the youthful Battenotte took out on the horse some of the grudges that he owed to the man. Be that as it may, Jean l'Hereux got many a trouncing as he laboured along the sandy pine-covered ridges which rise to the north-west of Fort Pitt.
On the night of the 21st November we reached the shore of the Eggo Lake, and made our camp in a thick clump of aspens. About midday on the following day we came in sight of the Saddle Lake, a favourite camping-ground of the Crees, owing to its inexhaustible stores of finest fish. Nothing struck me more as we thus pushed on rapidly along the Upper Saskatchewan than the absence of all authentic information from stations farther west. Every thing was rumour, and the most absurd rumour. "If you meet an old Indian named Pinguish and a boy without a name at Saddle Lake," said the Hudson Bay officer at Fort Pitt to me, "they may give you letters from Edmonton, and you may get some news from them, because they lost letters near the lake three weeks ago, and perhaps they may have found them by the time you get there." It struck me very forcibly, after a little while, that this "boy without a name" was a most puzzling individual to go in search of. The usual interrogatory question of "What's your name?" would not be of the least use to find such a personage, and to ask a man if he had no name, as a preliminary question, might be to insult him. I therefore fell back upon Pinguish, but could obtain no intelligence of him whatever. Pinguish had apparently never been heard of. It then occurred to me that the boy without the name might perhaps be a remarkable character in the neighbourhood, owing to his peculiar exception from the lot of humanity; but no such negative person had ever been known, and I was constrained to believe that Pinguish and his mysterious partner had fallen victims to the small-pox or had no existence; for at Saddle Lake the small-pox had worked its direst fury, it was still raging in two little huts close to the track, and when we halted for dinner near the south end of the lake the first man who approached was marked and seared by the disease. It was fated that this day we were to be honoured by peculiar company at our dinner. In addition to the small-pox man, there came an ill-looking fellow of the name of Fayel, who at once proceeded to make himself at his ease beside us. This individual bore a deeper brand than that of small-pox upon him, inasmuch as a couple of years before he had foully murdered a comrade in one of the passes of the Rocky Mountains when returning from British Columbia. But this was not the only intelligence as to my companions that I was destined to receive upon my arrival on the following day at Victoria.
"You have got Louis Battenotte, with you, I see," said the Hudson Bay officer in charge.
"Yes," I replied.
"Did he tell you any thing about the small-pox?"
"Oh yes; a great deal; he often spoke about it."
"Did he say he had had it himself?"
"No."
"Well, he had," continued ny host, "only a month ago, and the coat and trousers that he now wears were the same articles of clothing in which he lay all the time he had it," was the pleasant reply.
After this little revelation concerning Battenotte and his habiliments, I must admit that I was not quite as ready to look with pleasure upon his performance of the duties of cook, chambermaid, and general valet as I had been in the earlier stage of our acquaintance; but a little reflection made the hole thing right again, convincing one of the fact that travelling, like misery, "makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows," and that luck has more to do with our lives than we are wont to admit. After leaving Saddle Lake we entered a very rich and beautiful country, completely clear of snow and covered deep in grass and vetches. We travelled hard, and reached at nightfall a thick wood of pines and spruce-trees, in which we made a cosy camp. I had brought with me a bottle of old brandy from Red River in case of illness, and on this evening, not feeling all right, I drew the cork while the Cree was away with the horses, and drank a little with my companion. Before we had quite finished, the Cree returned to camp, and at once declared that he smelt grog. He became very lively at this discovery. We had taken the precaution to rinse out the cup that had held the spirit, but he nevertheless commenced a series of brewing which appeared to give him infinite satisfaction. Two or three times did he fill the empty cup with water and drain it to the bottom, laughing and rolling his head each time with delight, and in order to be sure that he had got the right one he proceeded in the same manner with every cup we possessed; then he confided to Battenotte that he had not tasted grog for a long time before, the last occasion being one on which he had divested himself of his shirt and buffalo robe, in other words, gone naked, in order to obtain the coveted fire-water.
The weather had now become beautifully mild, and on the 23rd of November the thermometer did not show even one degree of frost. As we approached the neighbourhood of the White Earth River the aspect of the country became very striking: groves of spruce and pine crowned the ridges; rich, well-watered valleys lay between, deep in the long white grass of the autumn. The track wound in and out through groves and wooded declivities, and all nature looked bright and beautiful. Some of the ascents from the river bottoms were so steep that the united efforts of Battenotte and the Cree were powerless to induce Rouge or Noir, or even Jean l'Hcreux, to draw the cart to the summit. But the Cree was equal to the occasion. With a piece of shanganappi he fastened L'Hereux's tail to the shafts of the cart-shafts which had already between them the redoubted Noir. This new method of harnessing had a marked effect upon L'Hereux; he strained and hauled with a persistency and vigour which I feared must prove fatal to the permanency of his tail in that portion of his body in which nature had located it, but happily such was not the case, and by the united efforts of all parties the summit was reached.
I only remained one day at Victoria, and the 25th of November found me again en route for Edmonton. Our Cree had, however, disappeared. One night when he was eating his supper with his scalping-knife--a knife, by the way, with which he had taken, he informed us, three Black feet scalps --I asked him why he had come away with us from Battle River. Because he wanted to get rid of his wife, of whom he was tired, he replied. He had come off without saying any thing to her. "And what will happen to the wife?" I asked. "Oh, she will marry another brave when she finds me gone," he answered, laughing at the idea. I did not enter into the previous domestic events which had led to this separation, but I presume they were of a nature similar to those which are not altogether unknown in more civilized society, and I make no hesitation in offering to our legislators the example of my friend the Cree as tending to simplify the solution, or rather the dissolution, of that knotty point, the separation of couples who, for reasons best known to themselves, have ceased to love. Whether it was that the Cree found in Victoria a lady suitad to his fancy, or whether he had heard of a war-party against the Sircies, I cannot say, but he vanished during the night of our stay in the fort, and we saw him no more.
As we journeyed on towards Edmonton the country maintained its rich and beautiful appearance, and the weather continued fine and mild. Every where nature had written in unmistakable characters the story of the fertility of the soil over which we rode--every where the eye looked upon panoramas filled with the beauty of lake and winding river, and grassy slope and undulating woodland. The whole face of the country was indeed one vast park. For two days we passed through this beautiful land,-and on the evening of the 28th November drew near to Edmonton. My party had been increased by the presence of two gentlemen from Victoria, a Wesleyan minister and the Hudson Bay official in charge of the Company's post at that place. Both of these gentlemen had resided long in the Upper Saskatchewan, and were intimately acquainted with the tribes who inhabit The vast territory from the Rocky Mountains to Carlton House. It was late in the evening, just one month after I had started from the banks of the Red River, that I approached the high palisades of Edmonton. As one who looks back at evening from the summit of some lofty ridge over the long track which he has followed since the morning, so now did my mind travel back over the immense distance through which I had ridden in twenty-two days of actual travel and in thirty-three of the entire journey-that distance could not have been less than 1000 miles; and as each camp scene rose again before me, with its surrounding of snow and storm-swept prairie and lonely clump of aspens, it seemed as though something like infinite space stretched between me and that far-away land which one word alone can picture, that one word in which so many others centre--Home.