Here also the whole settlement was on short allowance. Father had heard of Maskepetoon's camp being about 150 miles down country, but the reports were not encouraging. "Still," said he, "those Indians ought to be visited, and I am glad you have come, for now you can go to them." To do this we must have food, and as my brother David had made a fishery out at Long Lake that fall and his fish were still out there, we first went out to the lake, about sixty miles north, for the fish. On this trip David and father's Cree boy Job went with me. The round trip was only one hundred and twenty miles, but it still lingers in my memory as one of the hardest on record in my experience. The cold was so intense it worried our dogs to stand it, and the snow was so full of friction that our sleds seemed almost as though they were being pulled through sand. The camps were smoky, and on the whole it was a hard and disagreeable journey. In the Mission house at this time there lay upon his dying bed a poor young fellow who had wasted his substance in riotous living and was now paying the penalty in extreme physical prostration. He had gone out on the plains the same summer that I did, and wintered in the Saskatchewan the season of 1862-63. During that winter, while he and a companion were out hunting near Battle River, their camp was attacked one night by Indians. His companion was shot and killed, he himself wounded, and in making his escape, and in the subsequent journey to Edmonton, he underwent great hardship. It was after this, when he had thoroughly recovered, that I first met him. He was then a very strong man, one of the best swimmers I ever saw in the water. But he went across the mountains into the mining camps, and when he came back to our side his strength was about gone. Father found him in a room in the fort at Edmonton in sore straits, and arranged for his transport to Victoria. Both father and mother and all the rest were now doing everything they could to make him comfortable, but he was dying. He said to me as I bade him farewell for our trip to Maskepetoon's camp, "Good-bye, John, until we meet up yonder." "Why, Harry," I said, "I expect to come back soon." "Ah," he said, "but I will be dead before you come." And so it proved. Poor Harry was now all right. He had come to himself, and was born again. But it was a heaven-send to that young fellow in this wild country to fall at last into mother's hands. She in a multitude of ways soothed and comforted the last weeks of his life. CHAPTER XIX.