“I’ll pay you a visit some day, Redfeather, if I’m sent to any place within fifty miles of your tribe,” said Charley with the air of one who had fully made up his mind.
“Misconna is with his tribe,” replied the Indian, and a frown overspread his features as he spoke; “but Redfeather has been following in the track of his white friends; he has not seen his nation for many moons.”
The canoe—Ascending the rapids—The portage—Deer shooting and life in the woods.
We must now beg the patient reader to take a leap with us, not only through space, but also through time. We must pass over the events of the remainder of the journey along the shore of Lake Winnipeg. Unwilling though we are to omit anything in the history of our friends that would be likely to prove interesting, we think it wise not to run the risk of being tedious, or of dwelling too minutely on the details of scenes which recall powerfully the feelings and memories of bygone days to the writer, but may, nevertheless, appear somewhat flat to the reader.
We shall not, therefore, enlarge at present on the arrival of the boats at Norway House, which lies at the north end of the lake, nor on what was said and done by our friends and by several other young comrades whom they found there. We shall not speak of the horror of Harry Somerville, and the extreme disappointment of his friend Charley Kennedy, when the former was told that instead of hunting grizzly bears up the Saskatchewan he was condemned to the desk again at York Fort, the depot on Hudson’s Bay,—a low, swampy place near the sea-shore, where the goods for the interior are annually landed and the furs shipped for England, where the greater part of the summer and much of the winter is occupied by the clerks who may be doomed to vegetate there in making up the accounts of what is termed the Northern Department, and where the brigades converge from all the wide scattered and far-distant outposts, and the _ship_ from England—that great event of the year—arrives, keeping the place in a state of constant bustle and effervescence until autumn, when ship and brigades finally depart, leaving the residents (about thirty in number) shut up for eight long, dreary months of winter, with a tenantless wilderness around and behind them, and the wide, cold frozen sea before. This was among the first of Harry’s disappointments. He suffered many afterwards, poor fellow!