The Sioux spoke truly; a prairie horse is all right if he be fat. It matters little in winter what he may be in speed, or strength, or activity; as long as he is thick fat there is always a month’s work in him.
Early on the day following the completion of the hut, all the horses were driven in from the meadows in which they had spent the last three weeks. They all looked fat and strong.
During some days past the Cree had been busy preparing sleds, for light snow had now fallen; and although it had not lain long upon the ground, it was, nevertheless, likely that ere the time for the return of our party had arrived the ground would be white with its winter covering. These sleds would be carried crossways upon a horse until the snow would allow of their being drawn along the ground; they would each carry about 500 pounds of meat, and that would form an ample supply for the winter, with the venison and wild game that could be obtained in a ten-mile circle around the hut.
All preparations having been finished, Red Cloud, Donogh, the scout, and myself started on the following morning, bound for the south-west. We took with us a small tent, six horses, and plenty of powder and ball. The Cree and the dog remained to take charge of the hut. We expected to be absent about one month. It was the 20th of October, a bright, fair autumn day; hill and plain lay basking in a quiet sunlight, the sky was clear and cloudless, the air had in it that crisp of frost which made exercise a pleasure.
Winding along the meadows of the Red Deer, the pine bluff at the Forks was soon lost to sight behind its circling hills.
The evening of the third day after quitting the hut at the Forks found our little party camped on the edge of that treeless waste which spreads in unbroken desolation from the banks of the Eagle Creek near the North Saskatchewan to the Missouri. The spot where the lodge was pitched bore among the half-breed hunters of the plains the title of Les Trois Arbres.
It would have been difficult to have found a wilder scene than that which spread itself to the south and west from this lonely group of trees.
“Beyond the farthest verge of sight,” said the Sioux, as he pointed out the general direction he proposed to follow on the morrow, “lies the lake which the Indians have named the Lake of the Wind. From yonder group of trees to the shore of that lake, four long days’ journey, there does not grow one tree or bush upon the prairie. We must halt here to-morrow, to bake bread and cut wood, to carry on the sleds, sufficient to last us across this bare expanse. Once at the lake we shall find wood in plenty, and I think the buffalo will not be far distant.”
The sight upon which we now gazed was in truth almost sublime in its vast desolation. The sun, just descended beneath the rim of the western prairie, cast up into the sky one great shaft of light.
The intense rarity of the atmosphere made the landscape visible to its most remote depths. A few aspen clumps, and the three trees already mentioned, grew near the standpoint from which we looked; but in front no speck of tree met the eye, and the unbroken west lay waiting for the night in all the length and breadth of its lonely distance.