Next morning we surmounted the Brule Rapid—­Pusitao Powestik—­short but powerful, with a sharp pointed rock at its head, very troublesome to get around.  Above this rapid the bank consists of a solid, vertical rampart of red sandstone, its base and top and every crack and crevice clothed with a rich vegetation—­a most beautiful and striking scene, forming a gigantic amphitheatre, concentred by the seeming closing-in of the left bank at Point Brule upon the long straight line of sandstone wall on the right.  Nothing finer, indeed, could be imagined in all this remarkable river’s remarkable scenery than this impressive view, not from jutting peaks, for the sky-line of the banks runs parallel with the water, but from the antique grandeur of their sweep and apparent junction.

That afternoon we rounded Point Brule, a high, bold cliff of sandstone with three “lop-sticks” upon its top.  The Indian’s lop-stick, called by the Cree piskootenusk, is a sort of living talisman which he connects in some mysterious way with his own fate, and which he will often go many miles out of his direct course to visit.  Even white men fall in with the fetish, and one of the three we saw was called “Lambert’s lop-stick.”  I myself had one made for me by Gros Oreilles, the Saulteau Chief, nearly forty years ago, in the forest east of Pointe du Chene, in what is now Manitoba.  They are made by stripping a tall spruce tree of a deep ring of branches, leaving the top and bottom ones intact.  The tree seems to thrive all the same, and is a very noticeable, and not infrequent, object throughout the whole Thickwood Indian country.

Just opposite the cliff referred to, the Little Buffalo, a swift creek, enters between two bold shoulders of hills, and on its western side are the wonderful gas springs.  The “amphitheatre,” sweeps around to, and is cloven by, that stream, its elevation on the west side being lofty, and deeply grooved from its summit downward, the whole locality at the time of our visit being covered with raspberry bushes loaded with fruit.

The gas escapes from a hole in the ground near the water’s edge in a pillar of flame about thirty inches high, and which has been burning time out of mind.  It also bubbles, or, rather, foams up, for several yards in the river, rising at low water even as far out as mid-stream.  There is a level plateau at the springs, several acres in extent, backed by a range of hills, and if a stake is driven anywhere into this, and withdrawn, the gas, it is said, follows at once.  They are but another unique feature of this astonishing stream.