“Well,” said Rob, “of course we’d like to hunt a little more, but I don’t myself much like the thought of walking out of this country with a pack on my back and nothing to eat but a little flour. Besides, I’ve a feeling that this river is rising all the time now.”
“She’ll rise five inch last night,” said Moise. “I’ll mark heem on the stick.”
“Yes,” said Uncle Dick, “the June rise is going to chase us out, that’s sure. All those great snow-fields which you see up there on the Selkirks and the Rockies have got to melt and come right down here where our boat is now. So, Leo, you and George go on ahead—we’ll run late to-night and make forty miles to-day, at least, if we can. How far are we from Revelstoke?”
“S’pose ’bout hunderd mile,” said Leo. “Long way.”
“Not long if it was all clear water like this. But it isn’t. A pack-train on an unknown trail is one thing, but a boat on an unknown river is something mighty different. As I’ve told you, every foot of rise changes the river absolutely in the narrows. Therefore all I can allow you for lunch to-day is a piece of bannock—and we’ll eat that as we run.”
They found milder water now for twenty-five miles, and made steady progress. The wind had shifted a little bit, and Rob managed to get assistance out of it by rigging a sail from a corner of the tent. This brought the lead-boat ahead so steadily that Leo and George protested and made Rob take down his sail. But soon the long reach of slack water was passed. More and more they could hear, coming up-stream from perhaps a mile ahead, the low, sullen roar of rapids.
The water began to set faster and faster, and seemed each mile to assume more and more malicious habits. Great boils, coming up from some mysterious depth, would strike the boat as though with a mighty hammer so hard as to make the boys look around in consternation. At times they could see the river sink before them in a great slide, or basin, a depression perhaps two hundred feet across, with white water at its edges. Deep boils and eddies came up every now and then without warning, and sometimes the boat would feel a wrench, as though with some mighty hand thrust up from the water. Their course was hardly steady for more than a moment or so at a time, and the boats required continual steering. In fact, it seemed to them that never was there a stream so variable and so unaccountable as this they were now descending.
“She’s worse than the Peace River, a whole lot,” said Rob; and all the boys agreed with him. In fact, by this time all of them were pretty well sobered down now, for they could see that it was serious work which lay ahead of them. Now and again Uncle Dick would see the boys looking at the black forests which covered these slopes on each side of the river, foaming down between the Selkirks and the Rockies.