BOOKS.

THE WILD NORTH LAND.* Is the autumn of 1872 Captain Butler, who opened up for us the wonders of the Great Lone Land, and who will, we hope, give us a vivid picture of the Gold-Coast country, where he is now doing England good service, started from the Red River of the North for Lake Athabasca, from whence be followed the winding channel of the frozen Peace River to its great mysterious caflon in the Rocky Mountains, made a wonderful journey through this terrible pass, and reached the north of British Columbia in the end of May. He then followed a trail of 350 miles through the dense

forests of New Caledonia, and emerged into the first faint dawn- ings of civilisation at the frontier station of Quesnelle, on the Frazer River, still 400 miles north of Victoria. He did not make

this marvellous journey—mostly performed on foot, with a dog- friend and companion who deserves to be as immortal as Argus- in the discharge of any duty, military or humanitarian, such as had formerly led him to the awful solitudes where the Indians were dying of small-pox and fever, that he might bring them relief ; he made it for the love of adventure and of nature. On his title-page we read,—

" I cannot rest from travel. I will drink life to the lees.

I am become a name for always roaming with a hungry heart."

In his book the man is as plain to be read as the story,—a man with an extraordinary power of enjoyment in him, with elastic spirits, whose elation comes from a comprehension and love of nature, intense, subtle, and minute, so that the least objects are constantly supplementing his passionate pleasure in the greatest, and his heart is always attuned to the music of the spheres ; romantic, yet simple, profoundly humane, and sympathetic with all suffering and effort ; with a quick sense of the humorous, but a preference for the pictureique aide of things ; great physical endurance, so trained and habitual that it does not take account of itself ; a practical belief in God and soldiers, and an outspoken disdain for Mammon-worship and international arbitration. There is a great charm in the purposelessness of the journey, the unstudied freedom of the narration ; here is no " pioneer" of anything, but a holiday-maker, with all his hard- ships, a loiterer, with all his press and stress of toil ; a glad, un- fettered, uncommissioned spirit, ranging among the unknown sublime and glorious scenes of nature, just to look upon and learn their beauty. He makes neither too much nor too little of the dangers of the expedition ; there is neither the bombast of brag, nor the affectation of reticence ; the perils of the way turn up in their due time and place, and many and serious as they are, they never mar the sense of supreme enjoyment which pervades his record of how he traced two paths through the unknown territory which lies between the lonely prairies of the Saskatchewan and the icy oceans of the North.

The general features of that wide region be sketches thus, in a fitting introduction to the incidents of the journey :—

" It has prairies, forests, mountains, barren wastes, and rivers, rivers whose single lengths roll through twice a thousand miles of shoroland, prairies over which the rider can steer for months without resting his gaze on aught save the dim verge of the ever-shifting horizon ; moun- tains, rent by rivers, ice-topped, glacier-seared, impassable; forests, whose sombre pines darken a region half as large as Europe; sterile, treeless wilds, whose 40,000 square miles lie spread in awful desolation. . . . . . . In summer, a land of sound, a land echoing with the voices of birds, the ripple of running water, the mournful music of the waving * The Wild North Land, being the Story of a Winter Journey with Dogs across Northern North America. By Captain W. J. Butler, F.R.G.S. London: Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. pine-branch; in winter, a land of silence, a land hushed to its inmost depths by the weight of ice, the thick-falling snow, the intense rigour of a merciless cold ; its great rivers glimmering in the moonlight, wrapped in their shrouds of ice ; its still forests rising weird and spectral against the Aurora-lighted horizon; its notes of bird or brook hashed as if in death; its nights so still that the streamers moving, across the northern skies seem to carry to the ear a sense of sound, so motionless around, above, below, lies all other visible nature."

At the foot of the high ridge which marks the junction, or- " Forks " of the Saskatchewans, Captain Butler, and two frienda who had preceded him, and had built a winter but deep in the- pines and poplars, through which they cut vistas to give glimpses along the converging rivers, lived from the end of October to the beginning of February ; having stocked themselves with food by a hunting expedition on the buffalo plains two hundred miles " nearer to the setting sun." There are many descriptions of the Great Prairie and of the buffalo herds, and they are all interesting, but we do not know of any description to equal Captain Butler's,. in a chapter in which he tells of the beautiful rivers, with strange names eloquent of solitude (the very hush of listening is in the " Qu'Appelle,"), and the ocean of grass which has been the home of two wild creatures, the buffalo and the red man, for all the measureless time included in the reckoning " since before the white man came,"—the dim, unfathomable past of the Western world. " What shall we do?" said a young Sioux warrior to an American officer on the Upper Missouri some fifteen years ago ; " what shall we do ? The buffalo is our only friend. When he goes, all is over with the Dacotahs. I speak thus to you, because, like me, you are a Brave." Commenting on this, Captain Butler says :- "It was little wonder that he called the buffalo his only friend. Its- skin gave him a house, its robe a blanket and a bed, its undressed hide a boat ; its short, curved horn a powder-flask, its meat his daily food, its sinew a string for his bow, its leather a lariat for his horse, a saddle,. bridle, rein, anebit. House, boat, food, bed, and covering, every want. from infancy to age ; and after life itself had passed, wrapped in his- buffalo-robe, the red man waited for the dawn."

The realm of the buffalo has shrunken. Once two millions of square miles formed his undivided domain ; on three sides a forest boundary encircled it ; on the fourth was a mighty moun- tain range ; and the vast prairie was watered by giant rivers, with strange musical names—when they were named at all—and a• thousand affluents. The Great Prairie of to-day is as much shorn of' its fair proportions as are the herds which people it insignificant in their number', in comparison with the countless millions of the past. South-west from the Eagle Hill, far out in the prairie,. there lies a lake whose waters never rest ; day and night a cease- less murmur breaks the silence of the spot. " See," says the red' man, "it is from under that lake that our buffalo come. You. say they are all gone, but look, they come again and again to us- We cannot kill them all,—they are under that lake. Do you hear the noise which never ceases ? It is the buffalo fighting with. each other far down under the ground, and striving to get out upon the prairie." Captain Butler, having given a picturesque description of the Great Prairie, says it would not be possible to. convey the sense of solitude, of endless space, of awful desolation. which comes over the traveller as he looks across the vast space,. and sees a lonely herd of bisons trailing slowly through that snow-- wrapt endless expanse into the shadows of the coming night. The- difference between his pictdre of the scene and those with which we are already familiar is largely to be accounted for by the season at which he hunted there. Those who in summer or autumn visit. the Great Prairie of the Saskatchewan can form but a faint idea of its winter fierceness and utter desolation. " At the close of November, in the treeless waste," says the author, "amid fierce storm, and biting cold, and snow-drifts so dense that earth and' heaven seem wrapped together in indistinguishable chaos, they- will witness a sight as different from their summer ideal as a mid"- Atlantic mid-winter storm varies from a tranquil moonlight on. the /Egean Sea." They had a sixteen-days' return journey across the prairie, during which they did not meet one human being ; its desolation was at its height.

On a bright and beautiful day in February, Captain Butler started with his dogs, headed by the gallant, untiring Esquimaux " hauling-dog " Cerf Vola, whom no reader of the Great Lone Land will have forgotten, bound for the upper regions of the Rocky Mountains, while the Peace River Carton was still frozen_ Hehad six trains of dogs, a goodly show, and in three days after he passed Fort Carlton be entered the solemn region of dense forest and icy lake. The days' march, though the cold was what we should call terrible, was comparatively easy ; but the nights must have been awful, when despite of blanket or• buffalo-robe, and of great fatigue, it was impossible to remain,

long asleep. With the fading of the light and the hooting of the owl, the traveller in the North looks out for a good camping- place;" a few dead trees for fuel, a level space for his fire and his blanket, some green young pine to give him brush' for his lied, and all his requirements are supplied." The camp is made, the fire lighted, the bottle filled with snow and set to boil, the supper finished, the dogs fed, and the blankets spread out over the pine-brush. Then comes the night and the cold :—

" The cold begins ;—it has been bitterly cold all day, with darkness ; the wind has lulled, and the frost has come out of the doll, grey sky with still, silent rigour. If yon havea thermometer placed in the snow at your head, the spirit will have shrunken back into the twenties and thirties below zero; and just when the dawn is stealing over the eastern pine-tops, it will not unfrequently be into the forties. You are tired by a thirty-mile march on snowshoes; you have lain down with stiffened limbs and blistered feet, and sleep comes to you by the mere force of your fatigue ; but never goes the consciousness of cold from your waking brain ; and as you lie, with crossed arms and up-gathered knees, be- neath your buffalo robe, you welcome as a benefactor any short-haired shivering dog who may be forced from his lair in the snow to seek a few hours' sleep upon the outside of your blankets."

Some of the snow and ice pictures of this journey are terrible, one in particular, when they bad to travel the thirty miles' stretch of ice of Lac Ile k la Crosse, where there is not the slightest shelter- place from the merciless wind. The Hudson's Bay fort at Lake Athabasca, or "The Meeting-place of Many Waters," was but a half-way house in the journey, which had lain through the solemn forest or the ice-bound rivers. A terrible march of fifty-six miles had brought them to a large marsh upon the forest margin, then came a frozen river, and at last a great lake, with rocky, pine-did islands rising from the snowy surface. " To the east a vast expanse of snow-covered sea, with a blue, cold sky-line ; to the north a shore of rocks and hills, wind-swept and part covered with dwarf firs, and on the rising shore the clustered buildings of a large fort, with a red flag flying above them in the cold north blast." The lake was Athabasca, and the fort was Fort Chipweyan, but the traveller hailed it as home I One of the moat interesting chapters in the book is devoted to Athabasca, where many waters meet, and also many systems, for the writer says, " Silurian and

Devonian approach it from the west ; Laurentian still holds five- sixths of its waters in the same grasp as when what is now Atha- basca lay a deep fiord along the ancient ocean shore." Athabasca also marks the limits of, some great divisions of the animal kingdom. The reindeer and that carious relic of an older time, the musk-ox, come down near its north-eastern shores, for that bleak region known as the "Barren Grounds" is but a few miles distant. " These animals never pass to the southern end of the lake ; the cariboo, or reindeer of the woods,

being a distinct species from that which inhabits the treeless waste. The wood-buffalo and the moose are yet numerous on the north- west and south-west shores." A marvellous description of the Northern Lights over Athabasca is one of the beauties of this chapter, over which we linger, as the writer lingered at the fort before he faced the wilderness, worse than alone ; for here he parted with his friends, and set forward with three ill-conditioned scoundrels as his human companions, and his noble dogs, especially Cerf Vola, as guards and consolers. What a wilderness was that in which he camped on March 12, when on every iide, far as eye could reach, there lay nothing but hard, drifted snow, and from its surface a few dead willows raised their dry, leafless saplings ; and in the deep drift of the willow-bushes the men and the dogs burrowed until dawn. On the fourth day, they reached the bank of the Peace River, of which Captain Butler not unreasonably conjectures that .many of his readers may never Have heard ; though it is a great stream of water, and may, some time or other, he thinks, be worth fighting for. It rises west of the Rocky Mountains, in an almost wholly unknown alpine region, at a pre- sumed elevation of 6,000 feet above the sea-level, and issues from a lake to begin its course of 2,500 miles to the Arctic Sea. Here is the picture of its birth-place, which is also that of the Yukon, the Liard, and countless smaller streams " Situated close to the Pacific shore, at their source, these rivers nevertheless seek far distant oceans. A huge barrier rises between them and the nearest coast. The loftiest range of mountains in North America here finds its culminating point ; the cascade range shoots up its volcanic peaks to nigh 18,000 feet above the neighbouring waves. Mounts Cri-Hon and St. Elias cast their crimson greeting far over the gloomy sea, and Ilyamna and Island Corovin catch up the flames, to fling them further to Kamchatka's fire-bound coast."

The great Peace River, 200 miles from its source, cleaves the Rocky Mountain chain through a chasm 6,000 feet deep, and then for 500 miles it flows in a deep, narrow valley, from 700 to 800 feet below the level of the surrounding plateau. On its frozen

roadway the traveller was about to journey, after several laborious days, during which he fell in with some Indian tribes, concerning whom he tells us many interesting truths. Captain Butler always has a good word for the Indians ; the "deep-veined humanity" which makes one of the strongest charms of his books, as it is a leading trait in his character (his first act when he joined Sir Garnet Wolseley was to save some of their prisoners from being murdered by the Fantees), stirs him to a strong sense of the sufferings of the Red Man. Not a line of weak aentimentality disfigures his book ; he is as far from that as from the cheap and facile cynicism so frequent in English travellers' remarks upon the people whom it is the " Anglo-Saxon " mission to exterminate ; he is simply the witness of truth and the advocate of justice. They gained the Peace River or Unchagah by a small tributary, and thenceforth turned

night into day, breakfasting at sunset, dining at midnight, supping at sunrise, travelling all night under the steel-blue, atarlit heavens, and sleeping all day. Here is one of many pictures of that journey ; it is not, of course, nearly so striking as that of the passage of the Black Ca4on, but the latter would not bear curtailing :— " As the dawn broke in the east, and gradually grow into a broader band of light, the huge ramparts of the lofty shores wore strange, un- earthly aspects. Six hundred feet above the sea, wind and sun had already swept the snow, and the bare hill-tops rose to view, free, at last, from winter's covering. Lower down full many a rugged ridge and steep, scarped precipice held its clinging growth of pine and poplar, or showed gigantic slides, upon whose gravelly surface the loosened stones rolled with sullen echo into the river-chasm beneath. Between these huge walls lay the river, broadly curving from the west, motionless and soundless as we swept with rapid strides over its sleeping waters. Sometimes in the early morning, upon those steep ridges, the moose would emerge from his covert and look down upon the passing dog- trains, his huge, ungainly head outstretched to sniff the tainted gale, his great ears lying forward to catch the faint jingle of our dog-bells. All else was sunk in icy slumber, for only the owl, the moose, the wolf, and the raven keep winter watch over tho wilderness of the Peace River."

Of the dangers of the ice, the awful grandeur of the main range, the Inferno-like majesty and horror of the Black Caiion ; the " Pass," with its cone 9,000 feet high mirrored in the quiet water ; of the hunting and the wreck, of the overwhelming silent beauty

revealed in the 1,300 miles of travel, we have not space to say anything but this :—The book proves that, to use the traveller's

words, "the great solitude opened its soul to him, and in its depths he read its secrets."