“Yes,” said Rob, “I saw that the Finlay water coming down seemed to be discolored. But at first I supposed it was the natural color of that river. So you think there has been a thaw?”
“Maybe some sort of rain or chinook over in there,” said Alex. “What do you think, Moise?”
Moise and Alex talked for a time in the Cree language, Moise shaking his head as he answered.
“Moise thinks there has been a little rise,” interpreted Alex. “He says that below here the river sometimes cañons up, or runs between high banks with a narrow channel. That would make it bad. You see, the rise of a foot in a place like that would make much more difference than two inches in the places where the river is spread out several hundred yards wide. We know a little bit more about the river from here east, because we have talked with men who have been here.”
“I suppose we’ll have to wait here until it runs down,” said Jesse.
“Maybe not. If we were here earlier in the season and this were the regular spring rise we might have to wait for some time before we could go down with these boats. But the big flood has gone down long ago. There isn’t anything to hinder us as yet from dropping down and watching carefully on ahead as we go.”
Rob was again consulting his inevitable copy of Mackenzie’s Voyages.
“It took Mackenzie and Fraser each of them just eight days to get this far up the river from the west end of the Cañon of the Rocky Mountains,” said he. “Fraser must have built his boat somewhere west of the Rocky Mountain Portage, as they call it. That must be seventy-five miles east of here, as near as I can figure it from the Mackenzie story, but Uncle Dick’s friend, Mr. Hussey, said it was one hundred and thirty miles—and only two big rapids, the Finlay and the Parle Pas. I wish we could run it every foot, because Mackenzie did when he came down. At least, he doesn’t say he didn’t.”
“It was done by the traders for a long time,” said Alex, “all but those two rapids and that cañon. There is no trail even for horses between Hudson’s Hope and Fort St. John, but that is easy water. They serve St. John now with steamboats, and the old canoe days are pretty much over. But, anyhow, there is the main ridge of the Rockies east of us, and we’ve got to get through it somehow, that’s sure. Back there”—he pointed up the valley down which they had been coming now for so long—“we were between two ranges of the divide. The Finlay yonder comes down out of some other range to the northwest. But now the doubled river has to break through that dam of the eastern rim. I suppose we may look for bad water somewhere. Look here,” he added, examining the map, “here are the altitudes all marked on by the government surveyors—twenty-five hundred feet above sea-level at Giscombe Portage, twenty-two hundred and fifty at Fort McLeod. I suppose it was about three thousand feet where we started across. At the mouth of the Finlay it’s only two thousand feet—a big drop. But she drops nearly three hundred feet more to the west end of the portage, and two hundred feet more at the east end. That’s going downhill pretty fast—five hundred feet in less than one hundred and fifty miles—and some of it not very fast water.”
“Well,” ventured Rob, “why don’t we drop down as far as we can, and if we get caught by a flood then stop and take a little hunt somewhere back in the hills? You know, we haven’t got that grizzly yet you promised us.”