The pine-trees which gave the fall its name stood round us, dark and solemn, waving their long arms to and fro in the gusty winds that swept the valley.  It was a wild picture.  The pine-trees standing in inky blackness the rushing water, white with foam-above, the rifted thunder-clouds.  Soon the lightning began to flash and the voice of the thunder to sound above the roar of the cataract.  My Indians made me a rough shelter with cross-poles and a sail-cloth, and, huddling themselves together under the upturned canoe, we slept regardless of the storm.

I was ninety miles from Fort Garry, and as yet no tidings of the Expedition.

A man may journey very far through the lone spaces of the earth without meeting with another Winnipeg River.  In it nature has contrived to place her two great units of earth and water in strange and wild combinations.  To say that the Winnipeg River has an immense volume of water, that it descends 360 feet in a distance of 160 miles, that it is full of eddies and whirlpools, of every variation of waterfall from chutes to cataracts, that it expands into lonely pine edged lakes and far-reaching island-studded bays, that its bed is cumbered with immense wave-polished rocks, that its vast solitudes are silent and its cascades ceaselessly active—­to say all this is but to tell in bare items of fact the narrative of its beauty.  For the Winnipeg by the multiplicity of its perils and the ever-changing beauty of its character, defies the description of civilized men as it defies the puny efforts of civilized travel.  It seems part of the savage-fitted alone for him and for his ways, useless to carry the burden of man’s labour, but useful to shelter the wild things of wood and water which dwell in its waves and along its shores.  And the red man who steers his little birch-bark canoe through the foaming rapids of the Winnipeg, how well he knows its various ways!  To him it seems to possess life and instinct, he speaks of it as one would of a high-mettled charger which will do any thing if he be rightly handled.  It gives him his test of superiority, his proof of courage.  To shoot the Otter Falls or the Rapids of the Barriere, to carry his canoe down the whirling eddies of Portage-de-l’Isle, to lift her from the rush of water at the Seven Portages, or launch her by the edge of the whirlpool below the Chute-a-Jocko, all this is to be a brave and a skilful Indian, for the man who can do all this must possess a power in the sweep of his paddle, a quickness of glance, and a quiet consciousness of skill, not to be found except after generations of practice.  For hundreds of years the Indian has lived amidst these rapids; they have been the playthings of his boyhood, the realities of his life, the instinctive habit of his old age.  What the horse is to the Arab, what the dog is to the Esquimaux, what the camel is to those who journey across Arabian deserts, so is the canoe to the Ojibbeway.  Yonder wooded shore yields him from first to last the materials-he requires for its construction:  cedar for the slender ribs, birch-bark to cover them, juniper to stitch together the separate pieces, red pine to give resin for the seams and crevices.  By the lake or river shore, close to his wigwam, the boat is built;