in Hubbard and I fired, but both shots went
low.

We ran the canoe to shore, and while I made it fast, Hubbard and George
ran breathlessly ahead to where the caribou had disappeared. I followed
at once, and soon came upon them and the caribou, which fallen thirty
yards from the river with a bullet through his body just back of the
left shoulder. A trail of blood marked his path from the river to
where he lay. As the animal floundered there in the moss, Hubbard,
with the nervous impetuosity he frequently displayed, fired again
against George's protest, the bullet entering the caribou's neck and
passing down through his tongue the full length. Then George caught
the thrashing animal by the antlers, and while he held its head down
Hubbard cut its throat.

We made our camp right where the caribou fell. It was an ideal spot on
the high bank above the river, being flat and thickly covered with
white moss. The banks at this point were all sand drift; we could not
find a stone large enough to whet our knives. George made a stage for
drying while Hubbard and I dressed the deer. Our work finished, we all
sat down and roasted steaks on sticks and drank coffee. The knowledge
that we were now assured of a good stock of dried meat, of course,
added to the hilarity of feast. As we thought it best to hoard our
morsel of flour, it was a feast of venison and venison alone.

While waiting for our meat to dry, we had to remain in camp for three
or four days. On the next afternoon (Thursday, August 13) Hubbard and
I paddled about three miles up the river to look for fish, but we got
no bites, probably because of the cold; in the morning there had been a
fringe of ice on the river shore.

"We'll take it easy," said Hubbard while we were paddling upstream,
"and make a little picnic of it. I'm dead tired myself. How do you
feel, Wallace?"

"I feel tired, too," I said. "I have to make an extra effort to do any
work at all."

Hubbard was inclined to attribute this tired feeling to the freedom
from strain after our nerve-racking work of the last few weeks, while I
hazarded the opinion that our purely meat diet had made us lazy.
Probably it was due to both causes.

As Hubbard was anxious to obtain definite knowledge as to what effect
the high ridge of rocky mountains had upon our river, George and I,
with the object of ascertaining the river's course, left camp in the
canoe on Friday morning (August 14), taking with us, in addi