At daybreak, chilled to the marrow, I rose, and gathered the fire together in speechless agony:  no wonder, the thermometer stood at 40 degrees below zero; and yet, can it be believed? the baby seemed to be perfectly oblivious to the benefits of the bag, and continued to howl unmercifully.  Such is the perversity of human nature even at that early age!  Our arrival at the mission put an end to my family responsibilities, and restored me once more to the beloved bag; but the warm atmosphere of a house soon revealed the cause of much of the commotion of the night.  “Wasn’t-it-its-mother’s-pet” displayed two round red marks upon its chubby countenance!  “Wasn’t-it-its-mother’s-pet” had, in fact, been frost-bitten about the region of the nose and cheeks, and hence the hubbub.  After a delay of two days at the mission, during which the thermometer always showed more than 60 degrees of frost in the early morning, I continued my journey towards the east, crossing over from the North to the South Branch of the Saskatchewan at a point some twenty miles from the junction of the two rivers—­a rich and fertile land, well wooded and watered, a region destined in the near future to hear its echoes wake to other sounds than those of moose-call or wolf-howl.  It was dusk in the evening of the 19th of January when we reached the high ground which looks down upon the “forks” of the Saskatchewan River.  On some low ground at the farther side of the North Branch a camp-fire glimmered in the twilight.  On the ridges beyond stood the dark pines of the Great Sub-Arctic Forest, and below lay the two broad converging rivers whose immense currents; hushed beneath the weight of ice, here merged into the single channel of the Lower Saskatchewan—­a wild, weird scene it looked as the shadows closed around it.  We descended with difficulty the steep bank and crossed the river to the camp-fire on the north shore.  Three red-deer hunters were around it; they had some freshly killed elk meat, and potatoes from Fort-a-la-Corne, eighteen miles below the forks; and with so many delicacies our supper a-la-fourchette, despite a snow-storm, was a decided success.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Great Sub-Arctic Forest—­The “Forks” of the Saskatchewan—­An Iroquois —­Fort-a-la-Corne—­News from the outside World—­All haste for Home—­The solitary Wigwam—­Joe Miller’s Death.

At the “forks” of the Saskatchcwan the traveller to the east enters the Great Sub-Arctic Forest.  Let us look for a moment at this region where the earth dwells in the perpetual gloom of the pine-trees.  Travelling north from the Saskatchewan River at any portion of its course From Carlton to Edmonton, one enters on the second day’s journey this region of the Great Pine Forest.  We have before compared it to the shore of an ocean, and like a shore it has its capes and promontories which stretch far into the sea-like prairie, the indentations caused