Hats still in hand, the boys now stepped up one by one and shook hands with Alex and Moise. When they left this camp they looked back for a long time, and they could see their commemorative tree standing out tall, slender, and quite distinct from all the others. No doubt it stands there to-day just as it was left in the honor of our young voyageurs.
XVIII
BAD LUCK WITH THE “MARY ANN”
Alex now went down to the boats and began to rearrange the cargo, from which the boys saw that in his belief it was best to continue the journey that evening, although it now was growing rather late. Evidently he was for running down ahead of the flood-water if any such should come, although it seemed to all of them that after all they need have no great fear, for the river had risen little if any since morning.
They determined to put the big bear hide in the Mary Ann, and shifted some of the burden of that boat to the Jaybird, folding up the long hide and putting it at the bottom of the canoe under the thwarts, so that the weight would come as low as possible. When the Mary Ann had received the rest of her necessary cargo she showed most of her bundles and packages above the gunwale, and Alex looked at the two boats a little dubiously, even after Moise had carried down to the dugout of his cousins such of the joint supplies as even his liberality thought proper.
“We’ll try her, anyhow,” said Alex, taking a look up the river, which came rolling down, tawny now, and not white and green in its colors. So saying, they pushed off.
They must, at this camp, have been somewhere between twelve and twenty miles east of the mouth of the Parle Pas rapids, and they had made perhaps a dozen miles more that evening when they began to come to a place where again the mountains approached the stream closely. Here they could not see out at all from their place at the foot of the high banks which hedged them in. At nightfall they encamped in a wild region which seemingly never had known the foot of man. The continuous rush of the waters and the gloom of the overhanging forests now had once more that depressing effect which sometimes is not unknown even to seasoned voyageurs. Had they been asked, the young travelers must truthfully have replied that they would be glad when at last the mountains were passed and the prairie country to the eastward reached.
On the next day they continued among the high hills for several hours, although at length the river expanded into a wide reach which gave them a little free paddling. In such contractions of the stream as they met it seemed to them that the rocks were larger, the water deeper, and each hour becoming more powerful than it had been. Advancing cautiously, they perhaps had covered thirty miles when they came to a part of the stream not more than three hundred yards wide, where the current was very smooth but of considerable velocity. Below this the mountains crowded still closer in to the stream, seeming to rise almost directly from the edge of the banks and to tower nearly two thousand feet in height.