Walter Rossel was not a little heartsick, as he walked beside the loaded cart or took a turn at riding on the shafts and driving the shaggy pony. He was trudging along, absorbed in his own thoughts, when he was startled by the sudden dash of a horse so close that he instinctively jumped the other way. Looking up, he saw a freckled, red-haired lad in a Tam-o’-Shanter, grinning cheerfully down from the back of the wiry, black pony he had pulled up so short it was standing on its hind legs. Instantly Walter recognized the horseman. This red-headed boy was the first of the settlers he had seen when the brigade approached the Scotch settlement of Kildonan. He was the fisherman who had waved his blue bonnet to the boats.
The Scotch lad was greeting Louis as an old friend, and the Canadian responded smilingly. “Bo’jou, Neil MacKay,” he cried. “So your family goes again to Pembina.”
“What else can we do?” was the question. “We must eat, and there is sure to be more food at Pembina this winter than at Kildonan. We will hunt together again, Louis.”
“Yes, you and I and my other friend here, Walter Rossel.”
Walter and Neil responded to this introduction by exchanging nods and grins. The red-haired lad dismounted, and, leading his pony, fell into step by Walter’s side. The conversation of the three was carried on principally in French. The Scotch boy had learned that language during his first winter at the Red River. That winter, and several of the succeeding ones, he had spent at Pembina. Among the French and bois brulés he had had plenty of practice in the Canadian tongue. Indeed he spoke it far better than English, for his native speech was the Gaelic of northern Scotland. Already familiar with Louis’ Canadian French, Walter had little difficulty in understanding Neil, except when he introduced a Gaelic word or phrase.
The Scotch boy answered the newcomer’s questions readily and told him much about the Colony. Neil had come from Scotland with his father and mother, brothers and sisters, before he was nine years old. He was just fifteen now. When the MacKays and their companions had reached the Red River, they had found the settlement deserted, the houses burned. The settlers were gathered together again and spent the winter at Pembina, returning to Fort Douglas in the spring. Then came Cuthbert Grant and his wild bois brulé followers. Governor Semple was killed and Fort Douglas captured for the Northwest Company. The colonists, including the MacKays, were compelled to go to Norway House. They had returned when Lord Selkirk and his DeMeurons arrived and had gone on with their farming.
There were some two hundred settlers at Kildonan now, Neil said, and about a hundred DeMeurons along German Creek. How many Canadians and bois brulés really belonged at St. Boniface it was hard to tell, they came and went so constantly. “They do little farming on the east side of the river,” the boy remarked. “Hunting and fishing are more to their taste. I don’t blame them. They can get enough to eat more easily that way. Raising crops here is discouraging work. You will learn that soon enough.”
“Isn’t the soil good?” asked Walter. “We were told it was rich.”
“Oh, the soil is all right, after you get the ground broken. Breaking is hard work though, when you have nothing but a hoe and a spade. There is scarcely a plow in the Colony. There hasn’t been an ox till just lately. The Indian ponies aren’t trained for farm work. Things grow fast once they are planted, but what is the good of raising them when the grasshoppers take them all? I would go to Canada, as so many have done, or to the United States, but my father is stubborn. He won’t leave Kildonan. He has worked hard and he doesn’t want to give up his land. Yet if the grasshoppers keep coming every year, they will drive even him away.” Neil shook his red head, his face very sober.
The settlers, he went on to say, had no sheep and few pigs. Until a few weeks before, they had had no cattle. Alexis Bailly, a bois brulé trader had come, during the summer, clear from the Mississippi River with a herd of about forty.