At first Victor resolved to ride to the nearest fort of the fur-traders and fetch a doctor, or the means of conveying their wounded friend to a place where better attendance and shelter were to be had, but insurmountable difficulties lay in the way. There were no doctors in the land! The nearest abode of civilised man was several hundred miles distant, and neither he nor Rollin knew the way to any place whatever. They had depended entirely on Ian as a guide, and now that he was helpless, so were they! It would have been difficult for them even to have found their way back to the Red River Settlement without the aid of the scholastic backwoodsman. They were constrained, therefore, to rest where they were, hoping from day to day that Ian would regain strength sufficient to bear the fatigue of a journey. Thus the winter slowly slipped away, and wild-fowl—the harbingers of spring—were beginning to awake the echoes of the northern woods before Ian felt himself strong enough to commence the journey homewards.

 

That winter, with all its vicissitudes, hopes, fears, adventures, and pleasures, we must pass over in absolute silence, and re-introduce our three friends on the evening of a fine spring day, while riding over a sweep of prairie land in the direction of a thick belt of forest.

 

“The river must be somewhere hereabouts,” said Ian, reining up on an eminence, and gazing earnestly round him.

 

“Vas you ever here before?” asked Rollin.

 

“Ay, once, but not at this precise spot. I don’t quite recognise it. I hope my long illness has not damaged my memory.”

 

“If we don’t reach the river soon,” said Victor, with something of weariness in his tone, “this poor brute will give in.”

 

Victor referred to his horse, which had been reduced by some unknown disease to skin and bone.

 

“However, I’m well able to walk,” he continued, more cheerfully; “and it can’t be long before we shall fall in with the river, and some Indians, who will sell or lend us a canoe.”

 

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