l to
any one of these boats, and the ribs were flimsily put together.

"Well, I don't think much of these boats," grumbled John, as he passed
among them slowly.

"Don't be too rough with them," said Uncle Dick, laughingly. "Like
everything else up here, they may not be the best in the world, but
they do for their purpose. These scows are never intended to come
back, you must remember; all they have to do is to stand the trip
down, for a month or two. All the frame houses of the Far North are
made out of these scows; they break them up at the ends of the trips.
Our boat may be part of a church before it gets through.

"Come now, and I'll introduce you to old Adam McAdam, the builder and
pump-maker." He nodded toward an old man who was passing slowly here
and there among the rude craft. "This old chap is no doubt over
seventy-five years old, and he must have built hundreds of these boats
in his time. He makes the pumps, too, and a pump has to go with every
scow to keep it from sinking at first, before the seams get swelled
up."

The old man proved pleasant enough, and with a certain pride showed
them all about these rude craft of the fur trade. Each boat appeared
to be about fifty feet in length and nearly twenty in width, the
carrying capacity of each being about ten tons.

"Of course you know, my lads," said the old man, "a scow goes no
faster than the river runs. Here's the great oar--twenty feet it is in
length--made out of a young tree. The steersman uses that to
straighten her up betimes. But there's nothing to make the boat run
saving the current, do ye mind?"

"Well, that won't be so very fast," commented Rob, thinking of the
long distances that lay ahead.

"Oh, we're not confined to scows for much more than two hundred and
fifty miles," replied Uncle Dick. "At McMurray we get a steamer which
carries us down-stream to Smith's Landing. That's the big and bad
portage of the whole trip--that is to say, excepting the Rat Portage
of five hundred miles over the Yukon. But when we get below the
Smith's Landing portage we strike another Hudson's Bay Company steamer
that takes us fast enough, day and night, all the way to the Arctic
Circle. That's where we make our time, don't you see? These boats only
get us over the rapids.

"Of course," he explained, a little later, "a few of them go on down,
towed by the steamboats, because the steamboats are not big enough to
carry all the freight which must go north. There