From now on, he describes the region which he crossed as Mosquito Plains. White men alone in the wilderness become friends quickly. In spite of rivalry, the English trader presented the French with tobacco; the French in turn gave him pemmican of moose meat. On Wednesday, July 24, he left the fort. Sixteen miles up the Saskatchewan, Hendry passed Peotago River, heavily timbered with birch trees. Up this region the canoes of the four hundred Assiniboines ascended southward, toward the western corner of the modern province of Manitoba. As the river became shoal, canoes were abandoned seventy miles south of the Saskatchewan. Packs strapped on backs, the Indians starving for food, a dreary march began across country southwest over the Mosquito Plains. “Neither bird nor beast is to be seen. We have nothing to eat,” records Hendry after a twenty-six miles tramp. At last, seventy miles from where they had left the canoes, one hundred and forty from the Saskatchewan, they came on a huge patch of ripe raspberries and wild cherries, and luckily in the brushwood killed two moose. This relieved the famine. Wandering Assiniboines chanced to be encamped here. Hendry held solemn conference with the leaders, whiffed pipes to the four corners of the universe—by which the deities of North, South, East and West were called to witness the sincerity of the sentiments—and invited these tribes down to York; but they only answered, “we are already supplied by the French at Pasquia.” One hundred miles south of Pas—or just where the Canadian Northern Railroad strikes west from Manitoba across Saskatchewan—a delightful change came over the face of the country. Instead of brackish swamp water or salt sloughs, were clear-water lakes. Red deer—called by the Assiniboines _waskesaw_—were in myriads. “I am now,” writes Hendry as he entered what is now the Province of Saskatchewan, “entering a most pleasant and plentiful country of hills and dales with little woods.”