“No, the pass to the Canoe River is a wonderful thing in its way for this high country. Look over there to the south twenty miles or so, and you’ll see Cranberry Lake. The McLennan River runs out of that to join the Fraser right here, and that lake is just twenty-one feet above the level of this ground where we stand! You could pole a boat up there if you liked. Just over Cranberry Lake it’s only a mile to where the Canoe River bends in from the west. That country is just made for a pass from the Fraser to the Columbia, and to my mind it’s quite as interesting as any of these great mountain passes. I don’t know of any divide as low as this between two waterways as great as those of the Fraser and the Columbia. It’s only two thousand five hundred and sixty-three feet above sea-level at the summit, and, as I said, is only twenty-one feet above the Fraser.”
“We must have come down quite a way,” said Rob, “since we left the pass.”
“More than a thousand feet. And in that thousand feet the Fraser has grown from a trickle to a great river—in fifty miles downhill.”
“Well, I can see,” said Rob, looking about the pleasant valley which lay before them, “that this is a good place for a town.”
“Certainly,” said the leader of their party. “There’ll be more than one railroad come through here across the Yellowhead Pass, very likely, and already they are making surveys down the Fraser and Thompson and the Canoe River. Sometime there will be a railroad down the Big Bend of the Columbia below us, and it will have a branch up here, as sure as we’re standing here now. That will open up all this country from the points along the Canadian Pacific. Then all these names—the Thompson, the Fraser, and the Canoe—will be as familiar to the traveling public as the Missouri and the Mississippi. Yet as we stand here and look at that country it is a country as yet unknown and unnamed! I couldn’t map it, John, myself, for, although that country south of us is one of the most interesting of the continent, it is one of the least known. In short, that’s the game country we’ve been heading for, and I’ll promise you a grizzly when we get south of that flat divide.”
“Well,” said John, “that’ll satisfy me, all right. We’ve had mighty little shooting this far.”
“All in good time, all in good time, John, my boy. Maybe we’ll show you as good sport as you’re looking for, at least, what with rapids and grizzly bears.
“But now we must go on and find Leo, if we can. I sent word to him last fall for him to meet me here at the Cache this month. We’ll see what luck there is in the wilderness despatch.”
They passed on rapidly along and across the sunlit valley, exulting in a sense of freedom in getting out of the dark and gloomy mountains into an open country where they could see all about them. Soon they saw smoke rising above the tops of the low trees, and discovered it to come from a number of tepees, tall and conical, built with long poles, precisely like the tepees of the tribes east of the Rockies.
“That’s the Shuswap village,” said Uncle Dick. “Leo lives there with his people. Some good canoemen and hunters in there, too. First, let’s go on down to the end of the trail. I want you to see the actual location of the old Tête Jaune Cache.”