"Can't he trap here, then?" I asked.
"Well," replied Mac, "this might be the end of his line; but still, he ought to be farther up in the hills. There isn't much to trap close down on this flat. You see trappers usually have two camps, and they walk the line during the day, and take out what is caught in the night, setting the traps again, and sleeping first at one end and then at the other. However, we shall see when we get across." And he set about lighting a fire.
When we had crossed before there had been a rough kind of boat built out of pine slabs, which was as crazy a craft to go in as a butter-tub. It had been made by some hunters the winter before, and left there when they went west in the early spring, before we came up. I asked Mac what had become of it, for it was not where we had left it, hauled up a little way on a piece of shingle and tied to a stump.
"Somebody took it," he said, "or more likely, when the water rose after we crossed, it was carried away. Perhaps it's in the Pacific by this."
I went down to the stump, and found there the remains of the painter, and as it had been broken violently and not cut, I saw that his last suggestion was probably correct.
We sat down to supper by our fire, which gleamed brightly in the gathering darkness on the surrounding snow and the waters close beneath us, and ate some very vile bacon and a greasy mess of beans which we had cooked the night before we left our mountain camp.
"How are we going to cross, Mac?" said I, when we had lighted our pipes.
"Build a raft," said he.
"And then?"
"When we are over?"