[The Wild North Land]
I.—From Civilisation to Savagery
This was Sir William Francis Butler's second book on the regions and the people of the great Northwest of Canada. The fascination of the wilderness had got a grip upon him, and he conveys something of the same fascination to the reader, whom he allures through the immense and solemn aisles of the great sub-Arctic forest, makes him a joint-hunter after the bison on the Great Prairie, or after the marten and the beaver on the tributary streams to the Saskatchewan and the Assiniboine rivers. The reader is carried into the fastnesses of the rapidly-disappearing Red Man in mid-winter, and there are graphic revelations of the daring deeds of the half-breed descendants of the white pioneers of the Hudson Bay Company and the habitants from Lower Canada, who were the great discoverers and exploiters of the vast country between the Great Lakes and the Rocky Mountains, and beyond to the Pacific. Sir William's story is restrained and convincing, and his descriptions of his adventures in the Wild North Land and its wonderful scenery charm by their eloquence and poetic beauty.
It was late in the month of September, 1872, when, after a summer of travel in Canada and the United States, I drew near the banks of the Red River of the North. Two years had worked many changes in scene and society. A "city" stood on the spot where, during a former visit, a midnight storm had burst upon me in the then untenanted prairie. Representative institutions had been established in the new province of Manitoba. Civilisation had developed itself in other ways, but amidst these changes of scene and society there was one thing still unchanged on the confines of the Red River. Close to the stream of Frog's Point an old friend met me with many tokens of recognition. It was my Esquimaux dog, Cerf-Vola, who had led my train from Cumberland on the lower Saskatchewan, across the ice of the Great Lakes. To become the owner of this old friend again and of his new companions, Spanker and Pony, was a work of necessity.
In the earliest days of October all phases of civilisation were passed with little regret, and at the Rat Creek, near the southern shore of Lake Manitoba, I bade good-bye to society, pushed on to the Hudson Bay Company's post of Beaver Creek, from which point, with one man, three horses, three dogs, and all the requisites of food, arms and raiment, I started on October 14 for the North-west. I was virtually alone. My only human associate was a worthless half-breed taken at chance. But I had other companions. A good dog is so much more a nobler beast than an indifferent man that one sometimes gladly exchanges the society of the one for that of the other; and Cerf-Vola was that dog.
A long distance of rolling plain, of hills fringed with thickets, of treeless wastes and lakes spreading into unseen declivities, stretches from between the Qu'-Appelle to the Saskatchewan rivers. Through it the great trail to the North lays its long, winding course, and over it broods the loneliness of the untenanted. Alone in the vast waste Mount Spathanaw Watchi lifts his head; a lonely grave at top; around 400 miles of horizon. Reduced thus to its own nakedness, space stands forth with almost terrible grandeur. It was October 25 when I once more drew near the South Saskatchewan, and crossing to the southern shore I turned eastward through a rich undulating land, and made for the Grand Forks of the Saskatchewan, which we reached in the last days of October.
It is difficult to imagine a wilder scene than that presented from the tongue of land which rises over the junction of the North and South Saskatchewan rivers. One river has travelled through 800 miles of rich rolling landscape; the other has run its course of 900 miles through arid solitudes. Both have their sources in mountain summits where the avalanche thundered forth to solitude the tiding of their birth.
II.—The Twin Dwellers of the Prairie
At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction of these two rivers was a winter hut built by two friends who proposed to accompany me part of the long journey I meant to take into the Wild North Land. Our winter stock of meat had first to be gathered in, and we accordingly turned our faces westward in quest of buffalo. The snow had begun to fall in many storms, and the landscape was wrapped in its winter mantle. The buffalo were 200 miles distant on the Great Prairie. Only two wild creatures have made this grassy desert their home—the Indian and the bison. Of the origin of the strange, wild hunter, the keen untutored scholar of Nature, who sickens beneath our civilisation, and dies amidst our prosperity, fifty writers have broached various theories; but to me it seems that he is of an older and more remote race than our own—a stock coeval with a shadowy age, a remnant of an earlier creation which has vanished from the earth, preserved in these wilds.
As to the other wild creatures who have made their dwelling on the Great Prairie, the millions and millions of dusky bison, during whose migration from the Far South to the Far North the earth trembled beneath their tramp, and the air was filled with the deep, bellowing of their unnumbered throats, no one can tell their origin. Before the advent of the white man these twin dwellers on the Great Prairie are fast disappearing.