It was the 4th of October, bright with the warmth of the fading summer—that quiet glow which lingers over the face of nature, like the hectic flush upon a dying beauty, ere the wintry storms come to kill.
Small and insignificant, the Musk-Rat Creek flows on towards Lake Manitoba amidst bordering thickets of oak and elm trees. On each side, a prairie just beginning to yellow under the breath of the cold night wind; behind, towards the east, a few far-scattered log-houses smoke, and a trace of husbandry; the advanced works of that army whose rear-guard reaches to the Vistula; before, towards the west, the sun going down over the great silent wilderness. How difficult to realize it! How feeble are our minds to gauge its depths!
He who rides for months through the vast solitudes sees during the hours of his daily travel an unbroken panorama of distance. The seasons come and go; grass grows and flowers die; the fire leaps with tiger bounds along the earth; the snow lies still and quiet over hill and lake; the rivers rise and fall, but the rigid features of the wilderness rest unchanged. Lonely, silent, and impassive; heedless of man, season, or time, the weight of the Infinite seems to brood over it. Once only in the hours of day and night a moment comes when this impassive veil is drawn from its features, and the eye of the wanderer catches a glimpse of the sunken soul of the wilderness; it is the moment which follows the sunset; then a deeper stillness steals over the earth, colours of wondrous hue rise and spread along the western horizon. In a deep sea of emerald and orange of fifty shades, mingled and interwoven together, rose-coloured isles float anchored to great golden threads; while, far away, seemingly beyond and above all, one broad flash of crimson light, the parting sun’s last gift, reddens upwards to the zenith. And then, when every moment brings a change, and the night gathers closer to the earth, and some waveless, nameless lake glimmers in uncertain shore-line and in shadow of inverted hill-top; when a light that seems born of another world (so weirdly distant is it from ours) lingers along the western sky, then hanging like a lamp over the tomb of the sun, the Evening Star gleams out upon the darkening wilderness.
It may be only a fancy, a conceit bred from loneliness and long wandering, but at such times the great solitude has seemed to me to open its soul, and that in its depths I read its secrets.
Ten days dawned and died; the Mauvais Bois, the Sand Ridges, western shore of an older world’s immense lake, the Pine Creek, the far-stretching hills of the Little Saskatchewan rose, drew near, and faded behind us. A wild, cold storm swept down from the north, and, raging a day and a night, tore the yellow leaves from the poplar thickets, and scared the wild fowl far southward to a warmer home.
Late on the 10th of October we reached the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post of Beaver Creek, the western limit to the travels of my friend. Here, after a stay of three days and a feast of roasted beaver, we parted; he to return to Killarney, St. Stephen’s, and Denominational Education—a new name for the old feud between those great patriot armies, the Ins and the Outs; I to seek the lonely lands where, far beyond the distant Saskatchewan, the great Unchagah, parent of a still mightier stream, rolls through remote lakes and whispering pines its waters to the Polar Seas.
With one man, three horses and three dogs, and all those requisites of food, arms, and raiment with which a former journey had familiarized me, I started on the 14th of October bound for the North-west. I was virtually alone; my companion was a half-breed taken at chance from the wigwam at the scene of the dog Pony’s midnight escapade on the Red River. Chance had on this occasion proved a failure, and the man had already shown many symptoms of worthlessness. He had served as a soldier in an American corps raised by a certain Hatch, to hold in check the Sioux after the massacre of Minnesota in 1862. A raid made by nine troopers of this corps, against an Indian tent occupied by some dozen women and children, appears to have been the most noteworthy event in the history of Hatch’s Battalion. Having surrounded the wigwam in the night, these cowards shot the miserable inmates, then scalping and mutilating their bodies they returned to their comrades, bearing the gory scalp-locks as trophies of their prowess.
Hatch is said to have at once forwarded to Washington a despatch, announcing “a decisive victory over the Sioux by the troops under his command.” But a darker sequel to the tale must remain in shadow, for, if the story told to a Breton missionary rests on a base of truth, the history of human guilt may be searched in vain for a parallel of atrocity.
I had other companions besides this ci-devant trooper, of a far more congenial nature, to share my spare time with. A good dog is so much a nobler beast than an indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of one for that of the other.
A great French writer has told us that animals were put on earth to show us the evil effects of passions run riot and unchecked. But it seems to me that the reverse would be closer to the truth. The humanity which Napoleon deemed a dog taught to man on Bassano’s battle-field is not the only virtue we can learn from that lower world which is bound to us by such close ties, and yet lies so strangely apart from us. Be that as it may, a man can seldom feel alone if he has a dog to share his supper, to stretch near him under the starlight, to answer him with tail-wag, or glance of eye, or prick of ear.