"But I suppose there'll be plenty of men to
help do that."

"Now, we'll be leaving this place pretty soon," continued John. "I
hate to go away and leave my pony, Jim. This morning he came up and
rubbed his nose on my arm as if he was trying to say something."

"He'd just as well say good-by," smiled Rob, "for, big as our boats
are, we couldn't carry a pack-train along in them, and I think the
swimming will be pretty rough over yonder."

"These are pretty heavy paddles," said Jesse, picking up one of the
rough contrivances Leo had made. "They look more like sweeps. But
they're not oars, for I don't see any thole-pins."

"It'll be all paddling and all down-stream," said Rob. "You couldn't
use oars, and the paddles have to be very strong to handle boats as
heavy as these. You just claw and pole and pull with these paddles,
and use them more to guide than to get up motion for the boat."

"How far do we go on the Canoe River?" inquired Jesse of Rob. "You'll
have to be making your map now, John, you know."

"Leo called it a hundred and fifty miles from the summit to the
Columbia River," replied Rob, "but Uncle Dick thought it was not over
eighty or a hundred miles in a straight line."

"Besides, we've got to go down the Columbia River a hundred miles or
so," added John, drawing out his map-paper. "I'm going to lay out the
courses each day."

"It won't take long to run that far in a boat," said Rob. "And I only
hope Uncle Dick won't get in too big a hurry, although I suppose he
knows best about this high water which he seems to dread so much all
the time. Leo told me that about the worst thing on the Canoe River
was log-jams--driftwood, I mean."

The boys now bent over John's map on which he was beginning to trace
some preliminary lines.

"Yonder to the left and south, somewhere, Rob, is the Athabasca Pass,
which the traders all used who used the Columbia River instead of the
Fraser. Somewhere on our way south we'll cut their trail. It came down
some of these streams on the left. I don't know whether they came up
the Canoe River or not, but not regularly, I'm sure. On Thompson's map
you'll see another stream running south almost parallel to the
Canoe--that's the Wood River. They didn't use that very much, from all
I can learn, and that place on the Columbia called the Boat
Encampment was a sort of a round-up place for all those who crossed
the Athabasca Pass. Just to think, we're going the same trail on the
big ri