The very next day Rampike and Corbett started up the bluffs above the dug-out. Down below them the ice in the Frazer was already beginning to "run," but the snow on the mountain-sides lay hard and unmelted still, so that travelling without snowshoes was fatiguing in the last degree. From the top of the ridge the two men got a good view of the country through which they had to travel. The mountains, as far as they could see, followed the course of the Frazer until its junction with the Chilcotin, where they bent into a kind of elbow; in fact the two rivers and their attendant mountains formed two sides of a triangle, between which lay gulches and ravines innumerable, and the base of this triangle was the course laid out for them by Phon.
"Looks as if that Chinee corpse had bin laughin' at us after all," muttered Rampike. "A man would want wings to cross that country."
"Never mind, let's try it, Jim," said Corbett; and together the two men pressed on, floundering sometimes up to their armpits in the deep snow, and sometimes finding an easy way where the country at first sight appeared impassable.
On the third day of their journey, towards evening, they entered a narrow snow-choked canyon, which seemed to lead through the second main ridge of mountains to the Chilcotin.
As they entered this canyon Ned Corbett paused and looked searchingly up and down it, as if looking for some sign to distinguish it from its fellows.
But he found none. Like a hundred others which they had seen, this gully was deep and narrow and full of snow. The pines which grew on its sides seemed only just able to keep their heads above the white flood. Somewhere far down below, no doubt, there was a creek, which sang and flashed in the summer sunlight; but it was buried now out of sight by the snow and gagged by the frost.
"Do you think you know this here place, Ned?" asked Rampike, who had been watching his comrade's face.
"I feel as if I did, and yet I can't see anything, Jim, that I could swear to."
"Is that so? Well, it's no matter, because we must stick to this canyon anyway. It leads out on to the Chilcotin," replied the old man, and so saying he led on.