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Away across the plain skirting sleughs where ducks of various kinds, and in hundreds, quacked and plunged and fought joyously and all unheeding. Away with the morning air, rare and wondrously exhilarating, rushing at them and past them and filling their hearts with the keen zest of living.
French had committed Kalman with many and anxious injunctions, and it is Macmillan's due to say that every moment of that four weeks' journey was one of undiluted delight to the boy, although it is to be feared that not the least enjoyable moments in that eventful journey were those when he stood lost in admiration while his host, with the free use of his sulphurously psychological lever, pried his team out of the frequent sleughs that harassed the trail.
This packing and roping the doctor made his peculiar care, for he was a true Canadian, born and bred in the atmosphere of pioneer days in old Ontario, and the packing and roping could be trusted to no amateur hands, for there were hills to go up and hills to go down, sleughs to cross and rivers to ford with all their perilous contingencies before they should arrive at the place where they would be.
By these teeming lakes and sleughs and marshes hunted and trapped Indians and half-breeds. Down these streams and rivers floated the great fur brigades in canoe and Hudson's Bay pointer with priceless bales of pelts to the Bay in the north or the Lakes in the south, on their way to that centre of the world's trade, old London.
The tents and houses in which his Indians lived were extended along both sides of a long valley flanked at both ends by poplar-bluffs. At the bottom of the valley there was a series of "sleughs" or little lakes, affording good grazing and water for the herds of cattle and ponies that could be seen everywhere upon the hillsides.
Straight across the country, winding over plains, around sleughs, threading its way through bluffs, over prairie undulations, fording streams and crossing rivers, and so making its course northwest from Winnipeg for nine hundred miles, runs the Edmonton trail.
These scars and seams and pits are great lazy rivers, meandering streams, lakes, sleughs and marshes which form one vast system of waters that wind and curve through the rolls of the prairie and nestle in its sunlit hollows, laving, draining, blessing where they go and where they stay.
Once clear of the Saskatchewan River, the trail led over rolling prairie, set out with numerous "bluffs" of western maple and poplar, and diversified with sleughs and lakes of varying size, a country as richly fertile and as fair to look upon as is given the eyes of man to behold anywhere in God's good world.
The trail wound through bluffs and around sleughs, dived into coulees and across black creeks, and only the most skilful handling could have piloted the bronchos through. It was long after dark when they reached the ravine of the Night Hawk Creek, through which they must pass before arriving at the Lake.
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