Lisle nodded. He could take a hint; and he had no doubt that Nasmyth was right regarding the shot, though it is not easy to decapitate a swimming duck with a rifle. He began to talk about the portage; and soon after Jake returned with a single duck they went to sleep.
It was clear and bright the next morning and they spent the day carrying their loads a few miles up the hollow which pierced the height of the divide. Part of it was a morass, fissured with little creeks running down from the hills whose tops rose at no great elevation above the opening. This was bad to traverse, but it was worse when they came to a muskeg where dwarf forest had once covered what was now a swamp. Most of the trees had fallen as the soil, from some change in the lake’s level, had grown too wet. They had partly rotted in the slough, and willows had afterward grown up among them.
Now and then the men laid down their loads and hewed a few of the still standing trunks, letting them fall to serve as rude bridges where the morass was almost impassable, but the real struggle began when they went back for the canoe. At first they managed to carry her on their shoulders, wading in the bog, but afterward she must be dragged through or over innumerable tangles of small fallen trunks and networks of rotten branches that had to be laboriously smashed. It was heroic labor—sometimes they spent an hour making sixty yards—and Lisle’s face grew anxious as well as determined. Game had been very scarce; the deer would not last them long; and disastrous results might follow a continuance of their present slow progress. When, utterly worn out, they made camp on slightly firmer ground toward four o’clock in the afternoon, Lisle strode off heavily toward the bordering hills, while Jake pushed on to prospect ahead. Nasmyth, who was quite unable to accompany either, prepared the supper and awaited their reports with some anxiety.
Lisle came back first and shook his head when Nasmyth asked if he had found a better route on higher ground.
“Not a slope we could haul along,” he reported. “That way’s impracticable.”
It was nearly dark when Jake came in.
“It’s not too bad ahead,” he informed them.
They were not greatly reassured, because Jake’s idea of what was really bad was alarming. Nasmyth glanced at his companion with a smile.
“Is it any better than this?” he asked.
“A little,” answered Jake. “An old trail runs in.”