accompany me.  Here was a pleasant prospect—­stranded on the wild shores of the Moose Lake with one train of dogs, deserted and deceived!  There was but one course to pursue, and fortunately it proved the right one.  “Can you give me a guide to Norway House?” I asked the Hudson Bay Company’s half-breed clerk.  “Yes.”  “Then tell Bear that he can go,” I said, “and the quicker he goes the better.  I will start for Norway House with my single train of dogs, and though it will add eighty miles to my journey I will get from thence to Red River down the length of Lake Winnipeg.  Tell Bear he has the whole North-west to choose from except Red River.  He had better not go there; for if I have to wait for six months For his arrival, I’ll wait, just to put him in prison for breach of contract.”  What a glorious institution is the law!  The idea of the prison, that terrible punishment in the eyes of the wild man, quelled the mutiny, and I was quickly assured that the whole thing was a mistake, and that Bear and his dogs were still at my service.  Glad was I then, on the night of the 7th, to behold the wooded shores of the Cedar Lake rising out of the reeds of the great marsh, and to know that by another sunset I would have reached the Winnipegoosis and looked my last upon the valley of the Saskatchewan.

The lodge of Chicag the sturgeon-fisher was small; one entered almost on all-fours, and once inside matters were not much bettered.  To the question, “Was Chicag at home?” one of his ladies replied that he was attending a medicine-feast close by, and that he would soon be in.  A loud and prolonged drumming corroborated the statement of the medicine, and seemed to indicate that Chicag was putting on the steam with the Manito, having got an inkling of the new arrival.  Meantime I inquired of Bear as to the ceremony which was being enacted.  Chicag, or the “Skunk,” I was told, and his friends were bound to devour as many sturgeon and to drink as much sturgeon oil as it was possible to contain.  When that point had been attained the ceremony might be considered over, and if the morrow’s dawn did not show the sturgeon nets filled with fish, all that could be said upon the matter was that the Manito was oblivious to the efforts of Chicag and his comrades.  The drumming now reached a point that seemed to indicate that either Chicag or the sturgeon was having a bad time of it.  Presently the noise ceased, the low door opened, and the “Skunk” entered, followed by some ten or a dozen of his friends and relations.  How they all found room in the little hut remains a mystery, but its eight-by-ten of superficial space held some eighteen persons, the greater number of whom were greasy with the oil of the sturgeon.  Meantime a supper of sturgeon had been prepared for me, and great was the excitement to watch me eat it.  The fish was by no means bad; but I have reason to believe that my performance in the matter of eating it was not at all a success.  It is true that stifling atmosphere, in tense heat, and many varieties of nastiness and nudity are not promoters of appetite; but even had I been given a clearer stage and more favourable conducers towards voracity, I must still have proved but a mere nibbler of sturgeon in the eyes of such a whale as Chicag.