During the seven days which I remained at Carlton the winter was not idle.  It snowed and froze, and looked dreary enough within the darkening walls of the fort.  A French missionary had come down from the northern lake of Isle-a-la-Crosse, but, unlike his brethren, he appeared shy and uncommunicative.  Two of the stories which he related, however, deserve record.  One was a singular magnetic storm which took place at Isle-a-la-Crosse during the preceding winter.  A party of Indians and half-breeds were crossing the lake on the ice when suddenly their hair stood up on end; the hair of the dogs also turned the wrong way, and the blankets belonging to the part even evinced signs of acting, in an upright manner.  I will not pretend to account for this phenomenon, but merely tell it as the worthy pere told it to me, and I shall rest perfectly satisfied if my readers hair does not follow the example of the Indians dogs and blankets and proceed generally after the manner of the “frightful porcupine.”  The other tale told by the pere was of a more tragical nature.  During a storm in the prairies near the South Branch of the Saskatchewan a rain of fire suddenly descended upon a camp of Cree Indians and burned everything around.  Thirty-two Crees perished in the flames; the ground was burned deeply for a considerable distance, and only one or two of the party who happened to stand close to a lake were saved by throwing themselves into the water.  “It was,” said my informant, “not a flash of lightning, but a rain of fire which descended for some moments.”

The increasing severity of the frost hardened into a solid mass the surface of the Saskatchewan, and on the morning of the 14th November we set out again upon our Western journey.  The North Saskatchewan which I now crossed for the first time, is a river 400 yards in width, lying between banks descending steeply to a low alluvial valley.  These outer banks are some 200 feet in height, and in some by-gone age were doubtless the boundaries of the majestic stream that then rolled between them.  I had now a new-band of horses numbering altogether nine head, but three of them were wild brood mares that had never before been in harness, and laughable was the scene that ensued at starting.  The snow was now sufficiently deep to prevent wheels running with ease, so we substituted two small horse-sleds for the Red River cart, and into these sleds the wild mares were put.  At first they refused to move an inch—­no, not an inch; then came loud and prolonged thwacking from a motley assemblage of Crees and half-breeds.  Ropes, shanganappi, whips, and sticks were freely used; then, like an arrow out of a bow, away went the mare; then suddenly a dead stop, two or three plunges high in air, and down flat upon the ground.  Againthe thwacking, and again suddenly up starts the mare and off like a rocket.  Shanganappi harness is tough stuff and a broken sled is easily set to rights, or else we would have been in a bad way.  But for