CHAPTER X
The mouth of the Smoke River was so rough that the boys could not enter it in the canoe; and the dense growth of birch and willow along the shores would make portaging difficult.
"We'll have to track the canoe up," Horace decided.
They got out the "tracking-line"—a long, stout, half-inch rope—and attached one end of it to the bow of the canoe. Peter Macgregor harnessed himself to the other end, and started up the narrow, rocky strip of shore; Horace waded beside the canoe in order to fend her off the boulders. Fred, carrying the fire-arms and a few other articles that a wetting would have ruined, scrambled through the thickets.
The water was icy cold, but it was never more than hip-deep. Fortunately, the very broken stretch of the river was only a hundred yards long; after that, they were able to pole for a mile or so, and once indeed, the stream broadened so much that they could use the paddles. Then came a precipitous cascade, then a difficult carry, and then another stretch of poling.
They had gone about five miles up the river when Horace, who had been watching the shores carefully, pointed to a tree and gave a shout. It was a large spruce, on the trunk of which was a blazed mark that looked less than a year old.
"It's my mark," said Horace. "I made it last August. Right here I found one of the diamonds."
"We must stop and do some prospecting!" cried Fred.
"No use," replied his brother. "I prospected all round here myself, and for a mile or so up the river. I didn't go any farther, but I've a notion that we'll have to go nearly to the head of the river to find the country we want."
On they went, shoving the canoe against the current with the iron-shod canoe poles. They had all been looking up the kind of soil in which diamonds are usually found, and now they closely observed the eroded banks on both sides of the river. According to Horace's theory, the river, or one of its tributary streams, must cut through the diamond-beds of blue clay. But as yet the shores showed nothing except ordinary sand and gravel.
Two miles farther the river broadened into a long, narrow lake, surrounded by low spruce-clad hills and edged with sprouting lily-pads. It was a great relief to the boys to be able to paddle, and they dashed rapidly to the head of the lake. There, rapids and a long carry confronted them! They had made little more than fifteen miles that day when finally they went into camp; they were almost too tired to cook supper. And they knew that that day's work was only a foretaste of what was coming, for from now on they would be continually "bucking the rapids."
The next day they found rapids in plenty, indeed. They seemed to come on an average of a quarter of a mile apart, and sometimes two or three in such close succession that it was scarcely worth while to launch the canoe again after the first portage. It was slow, toilsome work; they grew very tired as the afternoon wore on, and shortly before sunset they came to one of the worst spots they had yet encountered.
It was a pair of rapids, less than a hundred yards apart. Over the first one the water rushed among a medley of irregular boulders, and then, after some ten rods of smooth, swift current, poured down a cataract of several feet. Huge black rocks, split and tumbled, broke up the cataract, and the hoarse roar filled the pine woods with sound.
"I move we camp!" said Fred, eyeing this obstacle with disgust.
"Let's get over the carry first and camp at the top," Peter urged. "Then we'll have a clear start for morning."
Fred grumbled that they would certainly be fresher in the morning than they were then, but they unpacked the canoe, and began to carry the outfit around the broken water, as they had done so many times that day. Once at the head of the upper rapid Horace began to get out the cooking-utensils.
"I'll start supper," he said. "You fellows might see if you can't land a few trout. There ought to be big fellows between these two cascades."
It did look a good place for trout, and Mac had an appetite for fishing that no fatigue could stifle. He took the steel fly-rod, and walked a little way down the stream past the upper rapid. Fred cut a long, slender pole, tied a line to it and prepared to fish in a less scientific fashion. As his rod and line were considerably shorter than Mac's, he got into the canoe, put a loop of the tracking-rope around a rock, and let himself drift for the length of the rope, nearly to the edge of the rough water. Hung in this rather precarious position, he was able to throw his hook into the foamy water just at the foot of the fall, and had a bite almost instantly, throwing out a good half-pound fish whose orange spots glittered in the sunlight.
Peter meanwhile was fishing from the shore lower down. The thickets were farther back from the water than usual, and he had plenty of room for the back cast. He was kept busy from the first, and when he had time to glance up Fred seemed to be having equally good luck.
But at one of these hurried glances his eye caught something that appalled him. The looped rope that held the straining canoe seemed to be in danger of slipping from its hold on the rock.
He shouted, but the roar of the water drowned his voice. He started up the bank, shouting and gesticulating, but Fred was busy with a fish and did not hear or see. Horace was cutting wood at a distance. And at that moment the rope slipped free. The canoe shot forward, and before Fred could even drop his rod he was whirled broadside on into the rapid.
Instantly the canoe capsized. Fred went out of sight in the foam and water, and then Macgregor saw him floating down on the current below the rapid. He was on his back, with his face just above water, and he did not move a limb.
Mac yelled at him, but got no answer. Fred had not been under long enough to be drowned. He had evidently been stunned by striking his head against a rock.
Then Mac realized the boy's new and greater danger. Fred was drifting rapidly head first toward the second cataract, and no one could dive over that fall and live. The rocks at the bottom would brain the strongest swimmer.
Mac instinctively dropped his rod and rushed into the water. The strength of the swirling current almost swept him off his feet. It was too deep to wade, and he was not a good swimmer. He could never reach Fred in time. They would go over the fall together.
Fred was more than thirty feet from shore. Mac thought of a long pole, and splashed madly ashore again. He caught sight of his fishing-rod, with its hundred yards of strong silk line on the reel.
Fred was now about twenty yards above the cascade when Mac ran into the river again, rod in hand, as far as he dared to wade. He measured the distance with his eye, reeled out the line, waving the rod in the air, and then, with a turn of his wrist, the delicate rod shot the pair of flies across the water.
Mac was an expert fly-caster. The difficulty was not in the length of the cast; it was to hook the flies in Fred's clothing. They fell a yard beyond the boy's body. Mac drew them in. The hooks seemed to catch for an instant on his chest, but came free at the first tug.
Desperately Mac swished the flies out of the water for another cast. He saw that he would have time to throw but this once more, for Fred was terribly near the cataract, and moving faster as the pull of the current quickened. Mac waded a little farther into the stream, leaning against the current to keep his balance.
The line whirled again, and shot out, and again the gut fell across Fred's shoulders with the flies on the other side. With the greatest care Mac drew in the line. The first fly dragged over the body as before. The other caught, broke loose, and caught again in Fred's coat near the collar, and then the steel rod bent with the sudden strain of a hundred and fifty pounds drawn down by the strong current.
Mac knew that the rod was almost unbreakable, but he feared for his line. The current pulled so hard that he dared not exert much force. Fred's body swung round with his head upstream, his feet toward the cataract, and the current split and ripped in spray over his head.
The lithe steel rod bent hoop-like. There was a struggle for a moment, a deadlock between the stream and the line, and Mac feared that he could not hold it. The light tackle would never stand the strain.
Mac had fought big fishes before, however, and he knew how to get the most out of his tackle. With the check on the reel he let out line inch by inch to ease the resistance; and meanwhile he endeavored to swing Fred across the current and nearer the shore.
As he stood with every nerve and muscle strained on the fight he suddenly saw Horace out of the corner of his eye. Horace was beside him, coat and shoes off, with a long hooked pole in his hands, gazing with compressed lips at his brother's floating body.
There was not a word exchanged. Under the steady pull Fred came over in an arc of a circle, but for every foot that was gained Mac had to let out more line. His legs were swinging already within a few yards of the dangerous verge, but he was getting out of the center of the stream, and the current was already less violent.
Inch by inch and foot by foot he came nearer, and all at once Horace rushed forward, nearly shoulder-deep, and hooked the pole over his brother's arm. At the jerk the gut casting-line snapped with a crack, and the end flew back like a whip into Peter's face. But Horace had drawn Fred within reach, had gripped him, and waded ashore carrying him in his arms.
"I'll never forget this of you, Mac!" he ejaculated as he passed the medical student.
Fred had already come half to himself when they laid him on the bank. He had not swallowed much water, but had been merely knocked senseless by concussion with a boulder.
"What's—matter?" he muttered faintly, opening his eyes.
"Keep quiet. You fell in the river. Mac fished you out," said Horace.
Fred blinked about vaguely, half-attempted to rise and fell back.
"Gracious! What a head I've got!" he muttered dizzily.
They carried him up to the camp, put him on the blankets and examined his cranium. The back of his neck was skinned, there was a bleeding cut on the top of his head and a big bruise on the back, but Mac pronounced none of these injuries at all serious. While they were examining him Fred opened his eyes again.
"Fished me out, Mac? Guess you saved my life," he murmured.
"That's all right, old fellow," replied Peter; and then he gave a sudden start.
"The canoe!"
In the excitement over Fred's rescue they had entirely forgotten it. It had drifted downstream. If lost or destroyed they would be left stranded in the wilderness—almost as hopelessly as castaways at sea.
Without another word Mac began to run at full speed down the bank in the deepening twilight. If the canoe had drifted right down the stream, he might never have overtaken it, but luckily he came upon it within a mile, lying stranded and capsized. By the greatest good luck, too, it was not ruined. It had several bruises and a strip of the rail was split off, but it was still water-tight.
The next morning Fred was fairly recovered of his hurts, but felt weak and dizzy, so that not much progress was made. During the whole forenoon they remained in camp. Horace went hunting with the shotgun and got a couple of ducks. None of them felt much inclined for any more fishing in that almost fatal spot.
On the following day, however, Fred was able to take his share of the work again, and the party proceeded. That day and many days after were much alike. They tracked the canoe up long stretches of rough water, where two of them had to wade alongside in order to keep it from going over. They made back-breaking portages over places where they had to hew out a trail for a quarter of a mile. At night when they rolled themselves into their blankets they were too tired to talk. But the hard training they had undergone before they started showed its results now. Although they were dead tired at night, they were always ready for the day's work in the morning. They suffered no ill effects from their wettings in the river, and their appetites were enormous.
The supplies, especially of bacon and flour, decreased alarmingly. Although signs of game were abundant, they did not like to lose time in hunting until they reached the prospecting grounds; but a couple of days later meat came to them. They had reached the foot of the worst rapid they had yet encountered. It was a veritable cascade, for the river, narrowing between walls of rock, leaped and roared over fifty yards of boulders. The portage led up a rather steep slope. The three boys, each heavily burdened, were struggling along in single file, when Horace, who was in front, suddenly sank flat, and with his hand cautioned the others to be silent.
"S-s-h! Lie low!" he whispered. "Give me the rifle!"
Macgregor passed the weapon to him, and then he and Fred wriggled forward to look.
Eighty yards away Fred saw the light-brown flank of a doe, and beside her, partly concealed by the underbrush, the head and large, questioning ears of a fawn. The animals were evidently excited, for as Horace lowered his rifle, not wishing to kill a mother with young, they bounded a few steps nearer, and stood gazing back at the thicket from which they had come. The wind blew toward the boys, and the roar of the cataract had drowned the noise of their approach.
Suddenly there was a commotion in the thicket, and two young bucks burst from the spruces and dashed past the doe and fawn toward the boys. At the same instant the lithe, tawny form of a lynx leaped out. It struck like lightning at the fawn, but the little fellow sprang aside and bounded after its mother. The lynx gave a few prodigious leaps and then stood, with tufted ears erect, glaring in disappointment. It had all happened within a few seconds, and the deer were disappearing behind some rocks and stunted spruces fifty yards to the right before the boys thought again of their need of meat.
At that moment, one of the bucks wheeled at the edge of the tangle behind which the other deer had passed. For an instant he presented a fair quartering shot.
"Shoot quick!" whispered Macgregor, excitedly.
As the repeater in Horace's hands cracked, the buck whirled round in a half-circle, leaped once, and fell.
Fred uttered a wild shout, slipped the tumpline from his head, and ran forward. He was carrying the shotgun and held it ready; but the buck, shot behind the shoulder, was virtually dead, although he was kicking feebly.
The lynx had vanished; there was no sign of the other deer. Only the rush of the water in the river-bed now disturbed the forest stillness.
The dressing of the game was no small task. It was late in the afternoon when the boys had finished it and had brought up the rest of their outfit to the head of the cataract. "Buck Rapids" they named the place. There was enough meat on the deer to last them for the next week at least. The slices they cut and fried that night, although not tender, were palatable and nourishing.
The weather had been warmer that day, and for the first time mosquitoes troubled them. The boys slept badly, and got up the next morning unrefreshed and in no mood to "buck the river" again.
"Why not stop here a couple of days and prospect?" Mac suggested at breakfast.
The proposal struck them all favorably. It was the real beginning of the search for fortune. Fred in particular was fired with instant hope, and immediately after breakfast he set out to explore the country north of the river; he intended to make a wide circle back to the Smoke River and to come homeward down its bank. He carried a compass, the shotgun, and a luncheon of cold flapjacks and fried deer meat. Horace went off to the south; Macgregor remained in camp, to jerk the venison by smoking it over a slow fire.
It was a sunny, warm day. Spring seemed to have come with a bound, and the warmth had brought out the black flies in swarms. All the boys had smeared themselves that morning with "fly dope" that they had bought at the railway station, but even that black, ill-smelling varnish on their hands and faces was only partly effectual. Great clouds of the little pests hovered round them.
Fred struck straight north from the river, and then turned a little to the west. He examined the ground with the utmost care. The land lay in great ridges and valleys, and he soon found that prospecting was almost as rough work as fighting the river. In the valleys the earth was mucky with melting snow water; on the hills it was rocky, with huge boulders, tumbled heaps of shattered stone, slopes of loose gravel; everywhere was a tangle of stunted, scrubby birch and poplar, spruce and jack-pine.
After half an hour he came upon a small creek that flowed from the northwest. With a glance at his compass, he started to follow it. For nearly three hours he plodded along the creek, digging into the banks with a stick and examining every spot where there seemed a chance of finding blue clay; but he found nothing except ordinary sand and gravel. At last, disappointed and disheartened, he turned back toward the Smoke River. After a mile or so he stopped to eat his luncheon, and built a smudge to keep the flies away; then he proceeded onward through the rough, unprofitable country.
But if he did not find diamonds, he came on plenty of game. Ruffed grouse and spruce partridges rose here and there and perched in the trees. He saw many rabbits, and there were signs where deer or moose had browsed on the birch twigs. Once, as he came over a ridge, he caught a glimpse of a black bear digging at a pile of rotten logs in the valley. The animal evidently had not been long out of winter quarters, for it looked starved, and its fur was tattered and rusty. The moment the bear caught sight of him, it vanished like a dark streak.
Fred found no trace that afternoon of blue clay, or, indeed, of any clay, but he happened upon something that caused him some apprehension. It was a steel trap, lying on the open ground, battered and rusted as if it had been there for some time. Scattered round it were some bones that he guessed had belonged to a lynx. Apparently the animal had been caught in the trap, which was of the size generally used for martens, had broken the chain from its fastening, and had traveled until it had either perished from starvation or had been killed by wolves.
Although rusty, the trap was still in working condition, and Fred, somewhat uneasy, took it along with him. Some one had been trapping in that district recently, perhaps during the last winter; was the stranger also looking for diamonds?
With frequent glances at his compass Fred kept zigzagging to and fro, and finally came out on the river again; but he was still a long way from camp, and he did not reach the head of the cataract until nearly sunset.
Horace had already come in, covered with mud and swollen with fly bites.
"What luck?" cried Fred, eagerly.
His brother shook his head. He had encountered the same sort of rough country as Fred; and to add to his troubles, he had got into a morass, from which he had escaped in a very muddy condition.
Then Fred produced the trap and told of his finding it and of his fears. The boys examined it and tested its springs. Horace took a more cheerful view of the matter.
"The Ojibywas always trap through here in the winter," he said. "The owner of that trap is probably down at Moose Factory now. Besides, the lynx might have traveled twenty or thirty miles from the place where it was caught."
In spite of the failure of the day's work they all felt hopeful; but they resolved to push on farther before doing any more prospecting.
The next morning they launched the canoe, and for four days more faced the river. Each day the work was harder. Each day they had a succession of back-breaking portages; sometimes they were able to pole a little; they hauled the canoe for hours by the tracking-line, and in those four days they traveled scarcely thirty miles.
On the last day they met with a serious misfortune. While they were hauling the canoe up a rapid the craft narrowly escaped capsizing, and spilled out a large tin that contained twenty-five pounds of corn meal and ten pounds of rice—their entire stock. What was worse, the cover came off, and the precious contents disappeared in the water.
About fifteen pounds of Graham flour and five pounds of oatmeal were all the breadstuffs they had left now, and they had to use it most sparingly.
But they were well within the region where Horace thought that the diamond-beds must lie. On the map it had seemed a small area; but now they realized that it was a huge stretch of tangled wilderness, where a dozen diamond-beds might defy discovery. Even Horace, the veteran prospector, admitted that they had a big job before them.
"However, we'll find the blue clay if it's on the surface—and the supplies hold out," he said, with determination.
The next morning each of the boys went out in a different direction. Late in the afternoon they came back, one by one, tired and fly-bitten, and each with the same failure to report. The ground was much as they had found it before, covered with rock and gravel in rolling ridges. Nowhere had they found the blue clay.
They spent two more days here, working hard from morning to night, with no success. The next day they again moved camp a day's journey upstream; that brought them into the heart of the district from which they had expected so much. The river was growing so narrow and so broken that it would be almost impossible for them to follow it farther by canoe. If they pushed on they would have to abandon their craft, and carry what supplies they could on their backs.
But they intended to spend a week here. They set out on the diamond hunt again with fresh energy. A warm, soft drizzle was falling, which to some extent kept down the flies.
Horace came back to camp first; he had had no success. He was trying to find dry wood to rekindle the fire when he saw Fred coming down the bank at a run. The boy's face was aglow.
"Look here, Horace! What's this?" he asked, as he came up panting. In his hand he held a large, wet lump of greenish-blue, clayey mud. Horace took it, poked into it, and turned it over. Then he glanced sympathetically at his brother's face.
"I'm afraid it isn't anything, old boy," he said. "Only ordinary mud. The real blue clay is more of a gray blue, you know, and generally as hard as bricks."
Fred pitched the stuff into the river and said nothing, but his face showed his disappointment. He had carried that lump of clay for over four miles, in the conviction that he had discovered the diamond-bearing soil.
Macgregor came in shortly afterward with nothing more valuable than two ducks that he had shot.
The boys were discouraged that evening. After the rain they could find little dry wood. It was nearly dark before Fred began to stir up the usual pan of flapjacks, and "Mac" set himself to the task of cutting up one of the ducks to fry. They were too much depressed to talk, and the camp was quiet, when suddenly a crackling tread sounded in the underbrush.
"What's that?" cried Horace sharply. And as he spoke, a man stepped out of the shadow, and advanced into the firelight.
"Bo' soir! Hello!" he said, curtly.
"Hello! Good evening!" cried Fred and Mac, much startled.
"Sit down. Grub'll be ready in a minute," Horace added. Hospitality comes before everything else in the North.
"Had grub," answered the man; but he sat down on a log beside the fire, and surveyed the whole camp with keen, quick eyes.
All the boys looked at him with much curiosity. He was apparently of middle age, with a tangled beard and black hair that straggled down almost to his shoulders. He wore moccasins, Mackinaw trousers shiny with blood and grease, a buckskin jacket, and a flannel shirt. He was brown as any Ojibwa, and he, carried a repeating rifle and had a belt of cartridges at his waist.
"Hunting?" he asked presently, with a nod at the deerskin that was hanging to dry.
"Now and again," said Horace.
"Well, ye can't hunt here," said the man deliberately, after a pause. "Don't ye know that this is a Government forest reserve? No hunters allowed. Ye'll have to be out of here by to-morrow."