Nothing special had happened during those two days, except that once our dogs and an old buffalo bull got badly tangled up, and we had to kill the bull to unravel the tangle. It happened in this wise: We started the bull, and he galloped off, almost on our course, so we let our dogs run after him, and the huge, clumsy fellow took straight across a frozen lake, and coming upon some glare ice just as the dogs came up to him, he slipped and fell, and the dogs and sleds went sliding in all around him. Thus the six trains got tangled up all around the old fellow, who snorted and shook his head, and kicked, but could not get up. We had to kill him to release our dogs and sleds.
The camp we came to had about two hundred lodges, mostly Wood Crees. They were glad to see us, and welcomed us right hospitably. We went into Chief Child's tent, and made our home there for the short time we were in the camp; but we may be said to have boarded all over this temporary village, for I think I must have had a dozen suppers in as many different tents the first evening of our arrival; and I could not by any means accept all the invitations I had showered upon me. While eating a titbit of buffalo in one tent, and giving all the items of news from the north I knew, and asking and answering questions, behold! another messenger would come in, and tell me he had been sent to take me to another big man's lodge—and thus, until midnight, I went from tent to tent, sampling the culinary art of my Indian friends, and imparting and receiving information. I had a long chat with the grand old chief, Maskepetoon; renewed my acquaintance with the sharp-eyed and wiry hunter and warrior, Ka-kake, and made friends with a bright, fine-looking young man who had recently come from a war expedition. He had been shot right through his body, just missing the spine, and was now convalescing. My new friend, some four or five years after our first meeting, gave up tribal war and paganism, and heartily embraced Christianity. He became as the right hand of the missionary, and to-day is head man at Saddle Lake.
Without recognizing the fact, I was now fairly in the field as a pioneer, and taking my first lessons in the university of God as a student in a great new land. Running after a dog-train all day, partaking of many suppers, talking more or less all the time until midnight, then to bed—thus the first night was spent in camp.
Next morning we traded our loads of provisions—calfskin bags of pounded meat, cakes of hard tallow, bladders of marrow-fat, bales of dried meat, and buffalo tongues. In a short time Williston and I had all we could pack on our sleds, or at any rate all our dogs could haul home. And now it required some skill and planning to load our sleds. To pack and wrap and lash securely as a permanent load for home, some four hundred pounds of tongues and cakes and bladders of grease and bags of pounded meat, on a small toboggan, some eight feet by one foot in size; then on the top of this to tie our own and our dogs' provisions for the return journey, also axe, and kettle, and change of duffels and moccasins; and in the meantime answer a thousand questions that men and women and children who, as they looked on or helped, kept plying us with, took some time and patient work; but by evening we were ready to make an early start next day.
In the meantime the hunters had been away killing and bringing in meat and robes. With the opening light, and all day long, the women had been busy scraping hides and dressing robes and leather, pounding meat, rendering tallow, chopping bones wherewith to make what was termed "marrow-fat," bringing in wood, besides sewing garments and making and mending moccasins. Only the men who had just come home from a war party, or those who came in the day before with a lot of meat and a number of hides, were now the loungers, resting from the heavy fatigues of the chase or war. The whole scene was a study of life under new phases, and as I worked and talked I was taking it all in and adapting language and idiom and thought to my new surroundings.
Another long evening of many invitations and many suppers, also of continuous catechism and questionings, then a few hours' sleep, during which the temperature has become fearfully cold, and with early morn we are catching our dogs, who are now rested, and with what food we gave them and that which they have stolen have perceptibly fattened.
Our Whitefish Lake friends are ready also, and we make a start. Our loads are high and heavy. Many an upset takes place. To right the load, to hold it back going down hill, to push up the steep hills, to run and walk all the time, to take our turn in breaking the trail (for we are going as straight as possible for home, and will not strike our out-bound trail for many miles, then only to find it drifted over)—all this soon takes the romance out of winter tripping with dogs; but we plod on and camp some thirty-five or forty miles from the Indian camp. The already tired drivers must work hard at making camp and cutting and packing wood before this day's work is done; then supper and rest, and prayer and bed, and long before daylight next morning we are away, and by pushing on make from forty to fifty miles our second day.
That night we sent a message back to the Indian camp. The message was about buffaloes, of which we had seen quite a number of herds that afternoon. The messenger was a dog. Peter Erasmus had bought a very, fine-looking dog from an old woman, and I incidentally heard her, as she was catching the dog, say to him: "This is now the sixth time I have sold you, and you came home five times. I expect you will do so again." And sure enough the big fine-looking fellow turned out a fraud. Peter was tired of him, and was about to let him go, when I suggested using him to tell the Indians about the buffaloes we had seen; so a message in syllables was written and fastened to the dog's neck, and he was let loose. He very soon left our camp, and, as I found out later, was in the Indian camp when the people began to stir next morning. We let him go about eight o'clock at night, and before daylight next morning he had made the two days' journey traversed by us. As an Indian would say, "The old woman's medicine is strong!"
There were six very weary men in our camp that night, thirty-three years ago. Floundering through the snow for two long days, pushing and righting and holding back those heavy sleds, whipping up lazy dogs, etc., chopping and carrying wood, shovelling snow—well, we wanted our supper. But after supper, what a change! Joke and repartee, incident and story followed, and while the wolves howled and the wind whistled and the cold intensified, with our big blazing fire we were, in measure, happy. Three of the six have been dead many years; the other three, though aging fast, are now and then camping as of old, still vigorous and hale.
During the next morning's tramp we separated, each party taking the direct course for home. That afternoon we met William and Neils, who had been all this time finding their horses, which strayed away the night of the storm, when we camped together by the old pound. Surely the spirit of the old structure had been avenged because of our burning some of it, for the storm had come, the horses had been lost, and our men had been in a condition of semi-starvation for some days. We told them where they could find buffaloes and the Indian camp, gave them some provisions and drove on. Having the track, we made the old pound the same evening, and, nothing daunted, proceeded to make firewood of its walls. To our camp there came that night the tall young Indian Pakan, who is now the chief of the Whitefish and Saddle Lake Reserves. He seemed to resent the desecration of the pound, but our supper and company and the news of buffaloes made him forget this for the time. He and two or three others were camped not far off, on their way out to the plains.