Old dog, they say thou hast no life beyond this earth of ours,
That toil and truth give thee no place amidst Elysian bowers.
Ah well, e’en so, I look for thee when all our danger’s past,
That on some hearth-rug, far at home, thou’lt rest thy limbs at last.
A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless waste, and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches out between the Qu’Appelle and Saskatchewan rivers. Roamed over by but few bands of Indians, and almost bereft of the larger kind of game, whose bleached bones cover it thickly, this expanse lies in unbroken solitude for more than three hundred miles. Through it the great trail to the north lays its long, winding course; but no other trace of man is to be found; and over lake and thicket, hill and waste, broods the loneliness of the untenanted.
Once it was a famous field of Indian fight, in the old days when Crees and Assineboine strove for mastery. Now it has almost lost the tradition of battle, but now and again a hill-top or a river-course, whose French or English name faintly echoes the Indian meaning, tells to the traveller who cares to look below the surface some story of fight in bygone times.
The hill of the Wolverine and the lonely Spathanaw Watchi have witnessed many a deed of Indian daring and Indian perfidy in days not long passed away, but these deeds are now forgotten, for the trader as he unyokes his horses at their base, and kindles his evening fire, little recks of such things, and hails the hill-top only as a landmark on his solitary road.
Alone in a vast waste the Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head, thickets and lakes are at his base, a lonely grave at top, around four hundred miles of horizon; a view so vast that endless space seems for once to find embodiment, and at a single glance the eye is satiated with immensity. There is no mountain range to come up across the sky-line, no river to lay its glistening folds along the middle distance, no dark forest to give shade to foreground or to fringe perspective, no speck of life, no track of man, nothing but the wilderness. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur. One is suddenly brought face to face with that enigma which we try to comprehend by giving to it the names of endless, interminable, measureless; that dark inanity which broods upon a waste of moorland at dusk, and in which fancy sees the spectral and the shadowy.
VIEW FROM THE SPATHANAW WATCHI.