made a tiny morsel for three men, but as the "first game of the trip,"
we hugely enjoyed it when George served it in a pot of soup.

At six o'clock we broke camp and laboured on, facing the same desperate
conditions that we had met the day before. It is true that the rain
had ceased to fall, but the good weather brought out the flies in
increasing swarms. We fairly breathed flies, and we dreaded them far
more than the hard work. Since they attacked us first, we had left our
faces unwashed so as to retain the "dope," and they were streaming with
a mixture of grease, dirt, blood, and perspiration.

The return of the sun also sent the mercury soaring. At noon that
Saturday it registered 90 degrees in the shade. Always at sunset,
however, the temperature dropped with startling suddenness, and a
variation of from fifty to sixty degrees between the maximum and
minimum record for one day was not an unusual thing as long as summer
lasted.

Floundering up the boulder-strewn river that Saturday, we found the
heat so oppressive that it seemed to us we had got into the torrid zone
instead of up to within a few hundred miles of the Arctic Circle. We
resolved, however, that the obstacles interposed against our advance by
the unfeeling wild should make us fight only the harder, George and I
receiving much inspiration from Hubbard, to whom difficulties were a
blessing and whose spirit remained indomitable up to the very end. And
when we sat down to our evening meal by a cosey fire, we had the
satisfaction of knowing that we had doubled our previous day's record
and were four miles further up the river.

On our first Sunday out we remained in camp to rest. We were all
pretty tired, and enjoyed the long sleep in the morning. The day was
fine, but very warm. In the morning Hubbard caught about twenty small
trout, and after luncheon he and George went up the river on a scouting
trip. When they returned in the evening, they reported important
discoveries. First they had come upon a small, rocky stream flowing
into our river from the south, which stream Hubbard felt sure must be
the Red River the Blakes had told us about, and a mile above that a
two-mile stretch of good water. But the discovery that pleased Hubbard
the most was some old cuttings that apparently had been made by
Indians; he was of the opinion, as were all of us, that they indicated
we really were on the Mountaineer Indian trail to Michikamau, and that
we un