Notes and Correspondence 



78th Battery C. W. A., 

 Dea^ Mrs. Parsons: Petawawa, Ont., June 9, 1918 



I have been a long while answering your letter of March 26th, but the 

 last few months have been the most eventful of a varied life of adven- 

 ture. 



We were a month late in getting away on our trip to the north and 

 so were delayed the whole trip. Had we left Grand Prairie up in Peace 

 River country early in January, as formerly planned, we would have 

 had good ice-traveling after the New Year's thaw. But when we got 

 there a lot of new snow had fallen and was so dry and soft that dogs 

 could do nothing in it; so instead of going up the Wapite, as we in- 

 tended, on the ice, we had to follow the trail via Beaverlodge and Red- 

 willow settlements, and had to get a team to haul our outfits to the end 

 of civilization, and then we followed a pack trail via Callahoo Lake and 

 struck the Wapite at the junction of Sheep River with the Wapite. We 

 had good going up Sheep River for four days to the cabin built in 

 November; but it was very cold and our grub ran out, and we were 

 pretty tired and worn out from lack of food and exposure when we 

 landed lat camp. We found the snow very deep up there and all the 

 game had migrated to a lower altitude, and we had passed many moose 

 on the way up, but now could not get any feed for our dogs. So after 

 a week of fruitless hunting we had to go back down the river for meat 

 for our starving dogs, and hauled it back to base camp up the river. 

 Later we got good going and worked northward along the outer ranges, 

 exploring for sheep and elk, neither of which we found any farther 

 north than we had previously found them. We got into a great caribou 

 country, and for a while never saw less than fifty in a day. These were 

 days of plenty and our dogs got fat. About the middle of March it 

 commenced to thaw and the ice got bad in the rivers inside the moun- 

 tains, and by the first of April we could only travel at night and early 

 in the morning, and we started back to base camp. On April 14th we 

 left base camp to return to civilization, expecting to make it in about 

 six or seven days, as it was all down hill and ice to go on. But there 

 came a sudden thaw that raised the water and broke up the ice, and at 

 the end of the third day we had only covered twenty-five miles of the 

 160 and the ice was no longer to be traveled upon, so we built a raft 

 and put our stuff on it; but the river was small and shallow and in 

 many places still bridged over with ice, and we would have to take the 

 raft apart and haul the logs over the ice to open water again. We had 

 two days of that and then a larger flood, and we had to lay up two days 

 while the ice ran past us. The third day we started again and only 

 went a mile or so when we were swept under a log jam and the raft 

 turned completely over, but we rescued everything except our dog har- 

 ness. For the next few days we never made more than two miles any 

 one day, as we caught up to the ice and the water fell, and it would not 

 run out, just melting slowly from the rear. We were completely out 



