“Thanks to Drewyer, they usually did. He got five deer, one day, and about every time he went out he hung up something. I think he’d got to the front in the party now, next to Lewis and Clark. Chaboneau they don’t speak well of.
“Shields was a good man, and the two Fields boys. But, though Clark was mighty sick, and Lewis got down, too, for a day or so, in here, they were about the best men left. The others were wearing out by now.
“You see”—here Billy flipped a cake over in the pan—“they couldn’t have had much wool clothing left by now—they were in buckskin, and buckskin is about as good as brown paper when it’s wet. They had no hobnails, and their broken, wet moccasins slipped all over those slick round stones. You ever wade a trout stream, you boys?”
“I should say so!”
“Well, then you know how it is. While the water is below your knees you can stand it quite a while. When it gets along your thighs you begin to get cold. When it’s waist deep, you chill mighty soon and can’t stand it long—though Lewis stripped and dived in eight feet of water to get an otter he had shot. And slipping on wet rocks——”
“Don’t we know about that! We waded up the Rat River, on the Arctic Circle.”
“You did! You’ve traveled like that? Well, then you can tell what the men were standing here. They hadn’t half clothes, a lot of them were sick with boils and ‘tumers,’ as Clark calls them. Some were nearly crippled. But in this water, ice water, waist deep, they had to get eight boats up that big creek yonder—beaver meadows all along, so they couldn’t track. Sockets broke off their setting poles, so Captain Lewis, he ties on some fish gigs he’d brought along. One way or another, they got on up.
“They now began to get short rations, too. At first they couldn’t get any trout, or the whitefish—those fish with the ‘long mouths’ that Lewis tells about. I’ll bet they never tried grasshoppers. But along above here they began to get fish, as the game got scarcer. Lewis tells of setting their net for them.”
“You certainly have been reading that little old Journal, Billy!”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s one great book, son. More I read it, the more I see how practical those men were. Now, those men were all fine rifle shots, and they’d go against anything, though along here there wasn’t many grizzlies, and all of them shy, not bold like the buffalo grizzlies at the Falls. But they didn’t hunt for sport—it was meat they wanted. Once in a while a snag of venison; antelope hard to get; no buffalo now, and very few elk; by now, even ducks and geese began to look good, and trout.