re obliged to dismount and lead their horses up or down.
Indeed, the trail scarcely could be called a trail at all, all trace
of the original traders' paths now being lost. Many persons, mostly
engineers or prospecting adventurers, had passed here, each taking
his own way, and the sum of their selections served only to make bad
very much worse. In the level places the trail was a quagmire, on some
of the steeper slopes simply a zigzag of scrambling hoof tracks.

They kept on, in spite of their discomforts, throughout the forenoon
without pause. It was their purpose to get on the farther side of as
many of these mountain streams as possible. They were now in a bold
mountain country, where numerous small tributaries came down to the
great Fraser which roared and plunged along beside their trail. "The
Bad River," old Sir Alexander Mackenzie called one of the headwaters
of the Fraser, and bad enough it is from its source on down.

They were now near the forks of the two main tributaries of the
Fraser, one roaring torrent coming down from the south. The trail held
to the north bank of the Fraser, following down from the lake along
the rapid but harmless little river which made its outlet. To ford the
Fraser was, of course, impossible. Time and again the young
adventurers paused to look down at the raging torrent, broken into
high, foaming waves by the numerous reefs of rock which ran across it.
Continually the roar of the angry waters came up to them through the
trees. More than ever they realized that they now were on the shores
of one of the wickedest rivers in all the Rockies, as their Uncle Dick
had told them of the Fraser.

They now observed that the trees of the forest through which they
traveled were much larger than they had been. But, splendid as this
forest growth had been, they found that in a large area fire had gone
through it in some previous year, and this burned country--or _brule_,
as Moise called it--made one of the worst obstacles any traveler could
encounter. This hardship was to remain with them almost all the way
down the Fraser to the Tete Jaune Cache, and it added immeasurably to
the trials of pack-train travel.

At last they pulled up alongside of a broad and brawling stream,
turbulent but shallow, a little threatening to one not skilled in
mountain travel, but not dangerous to a party led as was this one, by
a man acquainted with the region.

[Illustration: APPROACHING THE GRAND CANYON ON THE F