“Now, we’ll be leaving this place pretty soon,” continued John. “I hate to go away and leave my pony, Jim. This morning he came up and rubbed his nose on my arm as if he was trying to say something.”
“He’d just as well say good-by,” smiled Rob, “for, big as our boats are, we couldn’t carry a pack-train along in them, and I think the swimming will be pretty rough over yonder.”
“These are pretty heavy paddles,” said Jesse, picking up one of the rough contrivances Leo had made. “They look more like sweeps. But they’re not oars, for I don’t see any thole-pins.”
“It’ll be all paddling and all down-stream,” said Rob. “You couldn’t use oars, and the paddles have to be very strong to handle boats as heavy as these. You just claw and pole and pull with these paddles, and use them more to guide than to get up motion for the boat.”
“How far do we go on the Canoe River?” inquired Jesse of Rob. “You’ll have to be making your map now, John, you know.”
“Leo called it a hundred and fifty miles from the summit to the Columbia River,” replied Rob, “but Uncle Dick thought it was not over eighty or a hundred miles in a straight line.”
“Besides, we’ve got to go down the Columbia River a hundred miles or so,” added John, drawing out his map-paper. “I’m going to lay out the courses each day.”
“It won’t take long to run that far in a boat,” said Rob. “And I only hope Uncle Dick won’t get in too big a hurry, although I suppose he knows best about this high water which he seems to dread so much all the time. Leo told me that about the worst thing on the Canoe River was log-jams—driftwood, I mean.”
The boys now bent over John’s map on which he was beginning to trace some preliminary lines.