“As for those horses, however,” he continued, “we’ll take a crack at them ourselves if we have luck. You’ve been complaining that things are not exciting enough, and I propose to give you a touch of life. After we get done our work here—that is to say, after everybody has drunk up all the Scotch whisky that has come north on this boat—we’ll be getting on about our business. We’ll take our scow through.
“I’m going to contract with old Johnny Belcore, the traffic-handler here, to take our boat and an extra scow around through the rapids of the Slave River. You’ll see he’ll ship his horses along to use on the portages, and there’ll be more than one of them. It would take a lot of men to track one of these boats up the bank and along a mile or so of dry ground. They tell me that he uses rollers and pulls the boats by horse power. So, as that is one more example of the way the brigade gets its goods north, we’ll use that, if only for the sake of our own information.”
“That’ll be fine,” said Rob. “I’d much rather do that than climb on top of a lumber-wagon and ride across sixteen miles of muskeg. If we did that we’d miss all the excitement of seeing the Big Rapids of the Slave. I’ve been reading about them. You’re right, this is perhaps as bad boat water as any actually used by men.”
“Do you suppose it is worse than the White Horse Rapids up on the head of the Yukon?” asked John, looking up.
Uncle Dick laughed at this. “Son,” said he, “the White Horse Rapids could be lost a thousand times here in the falls of the Slave River, and no one would know where they went. Those rapids got their reputation through the stories of tenderfeet, for the most part. They don’t touch the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca, and the Grand Rapids don’t touch the Slave. She drops a hundred and sixty-five feet in sixteen miles! You can figure what that means, and if you can’t figure it we’ll see it with our own eyes.”
“I read once in some sort of a magazine story,” said Rob, “that the Peace River buffalo herd is somewhere up in this country, and that when people want to find out about it they go to Smith’s Landing.”
“That’s true,” said Uncle Dick. “That somewhat mythical herd has been under the more or less mythical charge of the Dominion government in here for some time. It isn’t worth while for us to make a trip out to see it; that is usually done by parties who are going back from here. Nor do we care to see the celebrated Dominion government reindeer herd which is out on the promontory of the Mountain Portage below here.
“I understand there were about a dozen of these reindeer once, but most of them got into the river and swam across. The last report was that the keeper of this herd had only one reindeer left, and he was sitting tight, with several Lapland dogs which had been sent out by the government!”
“The trouble with people that run things,” said Rob, judicially, “is that sometimes they don’t know about the things they are running.”