But a life more or less was not to stand in the way of the fur trade. The very next winter, Colin Robertson was back with the Hudson’s Bay fur brigade on the Saskatchewan and Athabasca, pushing the traders over the mountains to the Pacific Coast. “Opponents have given us no trouble,” he writes, “but starvation nearly forced us to abandon the country. From November to February, I lived on dried berries and water with flour.” Letters record how at one post famine compelled the Hudson’s Bay men to surrender to the Nor’Westers; how at another, Black, “the Northwest bully,” was cudgelled from his post by Hudson’s Bay partisans. So the merry play went on with these dare-devil gamesters of the wilderness till in the spring of 1820, bringing the fur brigade down the Saskatchewan, Robertson found the tables reversed. The gamesters were again playing with loaded dice. “The Nor’Westers have assembled to catch _us_ at Grand Rapids,” he writes. What defense can be expected from our sixty men worn down by hunger? This is returning the blow with a vengeance.... I told Mr. Miles, my assistant, all was not right at Grand Rapids. The governor was not there to protect our passing.... We hid the Company’s papers in a pemmican sack between beef and fat. If no scouts came back, either our spies were seized, or the Grand Rapids were clear and the passage free.... Passing a sleepless night, we embarked at daybreak, descended the current slowly, passed to the north bank ... then asked my guide to run the rapids without the men disembarking. This he positively refused to do, saying he would not venture the rapids unless the men got out and each carried a pack to lighten the canoe.... So we began to cross the portage and had nearly reached the end when a large party of Half-breeds and Indians started from concealment, armed.... A Northwest agent snatched my gun ... my men hesitated whether to come to the rescue, but I signalled them to be off and escape in the canoes.