Trending south from the H.B. post of Dunvegan, one reaches the Grande Prairie by passing through the fertile belt of Spirit River.  Grande Prairie is a loose term given to an area of thirty-five hundred square miles of black-loam country.  Settlers in this section never feed their cattle longer than six weeks each winter.

[Illustration:  Jean Batise, the Pilot on the Peace]

The Pouce Coupe would seem perhaps the most attractive of all the Peace River Prairies.  The natural vegetation on its one thousand acres proves the soil exceedingly rich.  Pea-vine and blue-joint hide a horse here in mid-August, and berry-vines show no touch of frost at mid-September.  Shrub-grown knolls dot the rolling surface, while lakes and streams give abundant water.  Through three mountain-passes the Chinook drifts in, tempering everything it touches and making it possible for Indians and pack-train men to winter their horses here without any trouble on the naturally-cured grasses.  They drive the animals in at the end of autumn, and the horses come out in the spring hardened and fit for work.  This is a paradise for wild animals.  Rabbits seek the pea-vine, the lynx and the fox follow the rabbits, and the bear finds here the berries that tickle his palate,—­blackberries, strawberries, cherries, cranberries, willow-berries, and saskatoons.

[Illustration:  Fort Dunvegan on the Peace]

On September 24th we engage waggons to carry our dunnage a hundred miles south from Peace River Crossing to Lesser Slave Lake.  This stands out in our memory as one of the most beautiful bits of the whole ten thousand miles that we travelled.  With the cool mornings and evenings and the suggestion of frost in the air it is ideal walking and we tramp almost all of the hundred miles, letting the waggons overtake us at meal-times and waiting for them again when it is time to camp.  The trail leads us through a rolling, lightly-wooded country, with many streams and open glades.  At every lake and runway we flush ducks and wild-fowl, like us bound south, and like us, too, loath to leave the golden fulness of this land.  The sun is strong, the stretch of woods on each side of the trail is a painter’s palette splotched with vivid golds, greens, crimsons, and tawny russets.  Robins, little moose-birds, and saucy whiskey-jacks are fairly revelling in the berries, crowding close to us, disputing the very berry we are popping into our mouths.  Spring lingers late in this Land of Promise.  Strawberry blossoms are around us everywhere, nestling amid the ripened fruit, and on September 25th in latitude 56 deg.  N. I pluck a little pasque-flower, one beautiful belated anemone.

Next evening’s tramp brings to view the little settlement of Lesser Slave, and we sigh to realise ourselves another one hundred miles nearer civilisation,—­the “civilisation” of Chicago!  A strong desire possesses us to about-face and back to the woods again.