“Fizzlum. Bakum powdum make blead.”
“Ah, I had forgotten,” said Gunson; and he took a small tin from his box.
An hour later the Indians were paddling slowly back along the river, and after a friendly good-bye from the settler who had taken charge of our boxes, we shouldered our packs, and began to trudge up the river-side, finding it easy going, for we were in quite an open part here, with a grassy margin for a short distance at the foot of the mountains on one side. But higher up the rocks began to close in the prospect, there was the faint roar of tumbling water, and dense black pine forests clothed the sides of the valley as far as we could see.
Before we had gone very far along the forest track, the perspiration was oozing out fast on my forehead; and lightly as I was loaded, I began to think regretfully of the boat, and of how much easier it was to sit or kneel there, and watch the Indians paddle, while over and over again I had come to the conclusion that it was a very fortunate thing that we were not alone, but backed up by such a tower of strength as Gunson, whose counsels were called in question every few minutes to decide which way we were to go next.
The direction was undoubted, for, so long as we kept to the valley in which the river ran, we could not be wrong, but the task was to keep along it by a way that was passable to people carrying loads.
For a mile or so beyond the tiny settlement we had left behind, we found, as we had been told, some traces of a track; but it was wanting more often than present, and several times over we thought we had come to the end of it, only for it to begin again some fifty yards further on.
At last though we had passed the final vestige of a trail, and there was the valley before us with the mountains rising up steeply on either side, and our way to make along the steep slope crowded with trees or covered with the débris of great masses of rock which had broken from their hold hundreds upon hundreds of yards above us to come thundering down scattering smaller fragments, and forming a chaos of moss-covered pieces, over and in and out among which we had to make our way.
“Rather rough,” Gunson said, “but keep up your spirits: it will soon be much better, or much worse.”
“It’s always like that—worse,” Esau grumbled to me at last, as our companion went forward, while the patient little Chinaman plodded on with his load as steadily as if he had been a machine.
“Never mind, Esau,” I said.