The night-camps along the lakes were all good ones; it took some time to clear away the deep snow and to reach the ground, but wood for fire and young spruce tops for bedding were plenty, and fifteen minutes axe work sufficed to fell as many trees as our fire needed for night and morning. From wooded point to wooded point we journeyed on over the frozen lakes; the snow lying packed into the crevices and uneven places of the ice formed a compact level surface, upon which the dogs scarce marked the impress of their feet, and the sleds and cariole bounded briskly after the train, jumping the little wavelets of hardened snow to the merry jingling of innumerable bells. On snow such as this dogs will make a run of forty miles in a day, and keep that pace for many days in succession, but in the soft snow of the woods or the river thirty miles will form a fair day's work for continuous travel.
On the night of the 19th of February we made our last camp on the ridge to the south of Lake Manitoba, fifty miles from Fort Garry. Not without a feeling of regret was the old work gone through for the last time--the old work of tree-cutting, and fire-making, and supper-frying, and dog-feeding. Once more I had reached those confines of civilization on whose limits four months earlier I had made my first camp on the shivering Prairie of the Lonely Grave; then the long journey lay before me, now the unnumbered scenes of nigh 3000 miles of travel were spread out in that picture which memory sees in the embers of slow-burning fires, when the night-wind speaks in dreamy tones to the willow branches and waving grasses. And if there be those among my readers who can il comprehend such feelings, seeing only in this return the escape from savagery to civilization--from the wild Indian to the Anglo-American, from the life of toil and hardship to that of rest and comfort-then words would be useless to throw light upon the matter, or to better enable such men to understand that it was possible to look back with keen regret to the wild days of the forest and the prairie. Natures, no matter how we may mould them beneath the uniform pressure of the great machine called civilization, are not all alike, and many men's minds echo in some shape or other the voice of the Kirghis woman, which says, "Man must keep moving; for, behold, sun, moon, stars, water, beast, bird, fish, all are in movement: it is but the dead and the earth that remain in one place."