The hunting round Strathclair was very good, there being plenty of rabbits, prairie chickens in myriads, and a few miles north, in the timber country, plenty of moose, elk, and spruce partridge; while on the prairie there was plenty of fun to be had shooting wolves, coyotes, and foxes for their pelts, and in trying to trap them. I say trying to trap them, as I put in a week at the game, trying every device I had ever read or heard of, and only succeeded in catching one coyote in a trap. However, I poisoned a good many, using a rabbit for a drag on horseback, and dropping baits at intervals; but in this method there is considerable trouble in finding your game after you have poisoned them, as they will sometimes travel miles from where they picked up the bait, and trailing on hard snow is slow work. The most satisfactory way is to shoot them, and I got more this way than any other, but it means heavy walking in the snow. Geekie had a fine larder, such as is only found up in that country. It consisted of an unchinked log-house, in which hung, while I was there, three sides of moose and simply hundreds of prairie chicken and spruce partridge, uncleaned and unplucked, but frozen as hard as a rock. This was his winter’s meat supply. I heard a story there, in regard to being careful while trapping, about a poor old man who made a living trapping, and who was accidentally found with both his hands caught in a trap he had been setting, and which was chained to a log. He had been dead a couple of days when found, from the cold. No one will ever know how such a man, who had spent years at the business, came to be caught. Manitoba is not all prairie, nor timberless, as so many people imagine. In the west and the south are immense stretches of country, dead level, and with hardly a tree; but north, on the Manitoba North-Western Railroad towards Strathclair, the country is rolling, and there are patches of timber, mostly small. Still farther north the country gets quite hilly, and there are large stretches of fine timber. It is all capital wheat country, and also good for cattle, the only drawback being occasional summer frosts and poor means of transport, though this latter will soon be remedied by the advent of the new Grand Trunk Railway which is building across the country; and also, as I understand, the Hudson Bay Railway is finally to be built. The country, however, is far from beautiful.