Goodrich was very glad when he passed over the bar into Toba River at the Inlet’s head, stole by an Indian village, and made his solitary camp five miles upstream. For he was now beyond the last settler’s clearing, fairly into the wilderness. He need no longer move furtively in the dark. He could bare his face to the sun, travel openly and unafraid. Pursuit could come from only one direction; from behind. It must come as he himself had come, by paddle and pike pole.
Three days up Toba Valley, Bill Goodrich was forced to admit that they must have guessed right and followed fast—also that some one must have seen him. Perhaps a Siwash had watched him from cover on the bank on the lower stretches of the Toba, and talked when the officers came seeking.
Goodrich had followed around a great sweeping bend in the river, a twelve-mile loop that brought him after six hours’ labor at the pike pole back within twenty minutes walk of where he had cooked his breakfast. A narrow neck of land separated the two channels. Goodrich had heard of the “Big Bend.” When he found himself above it, something of the same instinct that wakes a deer double on its track, sent him across the neck. He had been told long ago that there was a portage across this neck. It might be as well to know about this portage. And he had a sudden craving to look back downriver.
He found the portage with a little difficulty, a level trail blazed through heavy cedar—a trail craftily blind at both ends. He found something else, less to his liking. Peering from a screen of brush on the downstream side of the neck he saw a Siwash dugout coming up a long, straight stretch. Two men stood in it, thrusting stoutly on pike poles. A third walked the gravel bars along shore.
Goodrich watched till they came up. They beached the canoe within forty yards of him. Two men were white. One was an Indian, a stout, wooden-faced Siwash.
“Po’tage da’,” the Siwash indicated.
The two men gazed at the heavy stand of cedar on the valley floor, the mat of undergrowth that ran to the river bank, fern and blackberry vines, thorny devil’s club, all the foot-tripping and skin-raking tangle that clothes the floor of B. C. forests. They did not regard the prospect with pleasure.
“How far across?”
“Maybeso half mile,” the Siwash answered. He stood staring indifferently.
“Pack the infernal dugout and our junk through half a mile of that jungle? Well, I guess not,” one said. “Me for the river. Chances are we’d lose time on a carry in that brush.”