They all laughed heartily over this at Leo, who joined in.
“But it’s true,” Uncle Dick went on, “there never has been an original passage of the Rocky Mountains made by a white man, from the time of Lewis and Clark and Mackenzie up to the modern engineers, which was not conducted, in reality, by some native who pointed out the way.
“Now here we are, with Leo and George. I trust them perfectly. Leo’s map, there on the sand at the Boat Encampment, showed me that he was perfectly accurate, and that he knew the places of all the streams and rapids. So I feel no fear about our getting down the Big Bend from here with him as our guide. I’ll warrant that Leo can draw a map of the river from here to Revelstoke as accurately as any professional map-maker, and name every stream and tell every rapid all the way down. In short, we furnish the grub and Leo furnishes the experience.”
“We’ll not furnish grub much longer,” said Moise. “The flour she’s getting mighty low, and not much pork now, and the tea she’s ’bout gone.”
“Well, what could you expect?” said Uncle Dick. “With three Injuns and an engineer to eat, we ought to have an extra boat to carry the grub—not to mention John, here, who is hungry all the time. We may have to eat our moccasins yet, young men.”
“Leo says we can’t get any fish yet,” said John, “and we’re not to stop for any more bear meat, even if we could eat it. We’re not apt to get any grub right along the river either. I don’t see how any one can hunt in this awful forest. It’s always cold and dark, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to eat there. Rob and I measured some trees by stretching out our arms, and we figured that they were thirty feet or more around, some of them. And one log we walked which paced over three hundred feet—it was so thick we couldn’t crawl over it at all. That’s no sort of place to hunt.”
“No, not for anything unless it was a porcupine,” said Uncle Dick. “We may have to come to that. But even with a little grub we can last for a hundred miles or so, can’t we? Can’t we make forty or fifty miles a day, Leo?”
Leo laughed and shook his head. “Some day not make more than ten or twelve mile,” said he.
“Well, I know that there’s a good deal of slack water for quite a way below here. At least, I have heard that that is the case. So for a time, if we don’t meet bad head-winds, we can put a good deal of this country back of us.”
“Could any one walk along these banks and get out to the settlements at all if he were left alone in here?” inquired Rob.