"Well," said David as he strapped on his snowshoes, "they won't get it."
"No," agreed Nell, "they won't. But they'll make a good try, because when people begin on a nasty job they get kind of involved and have to go on."
"Best thing is not to begin," said her brother in rather a sententious voice.
Nell showed her pretty teeth in a silent laugh.
"Come on," she whispered, as she fastened the harness on her odd steeds. "Off we go, Da, and God bless us all--Dad as well."
The fall of the ground was steepish, but the track was fairly beaten out, because winter and summer it was a path to the stream below. The distance was hardly more than half a mile, and in summer Nell went up and down often for water. In winter they went up and down almost as often for fish, as they had got an ice-hole trap in the stream, which was deepish, though not very wide so early in its course, its source being way up in the mountains at the back of the log house.
Nell's plan was quite definite. She meant to get on the "River" and follow its course to the lake--about thirty miles, perhaps more--cross the lake, get on to the ever-widening river and go on at top speed till their river joined up with the Moose, when they might hope to hit on human habitations.
It was a reasonable plan, but there was one very serious danger--the possibility that "the bottom might fall out of the trail," as the language of the northlands puts it. In other words, that the ice might break and go down-stream--one moving mass, hundreds of miles in length, cracking, heaving, and piling up on itself. That happened every spring. The farther up north you were the later it took place, of course. A few days of sunshine, a milder feel in the wind, and the springs in the hills would begin to trickle into the streams, the streams into the rivers, and up would rise the bursting ice on the swollen water.
Now that was what Nell was dreading most of all. A thaw would make the snow clog, too; there was extra effort when the trail was heavy. As they darted down the hill she sniffed the air like a dog; the snowflakes drifting against her face were rather large and wettish, not like the biting ice powder that drove along in the winter.
A thaw was coming, but she would do this journey before it made the river road impassable.