you not?"

"But what is it, then?"

"Look closely."

They went to the edge of the beach and looked up and down the river
carefully, also studying the forking valleys into which they could see
from the place where they were in camp.

"Well, I don't know," said Rob, "but it seems to me she's rising a
little!"

Alex nodded. "We've been in camp here three hours now," said he, "and
she's come up a little more than an inch."

"Why, how do you know that?" asked John.

"I set a stick with a notch at water-level when we first came ashore."

"How did you happen to think of that?"

"Very likely the same thing which made Rob guess it."

"Yes," said Rob, "I saw that the Finlay water coming down seemed to be
discolored. But at first I supposed it was the natural color of that
river. So you think there has been a thaw?"

"Maybe some sort of rain or chinook over in there," said Alex. "What
do you think, Moise?"

Moise and Alex talked for a time in the Cree language, Moise shaking
his head as he answered.

"Moise thinks there has been a little rise," interpreted Alex. "He
says that below here the river sometimes canyons up, or runs between
high banks with a narrow channel. That would make it bad. You see, the
rise of a foot in a place like that would make much more difference
than two inches in the places where the river is spread out several
hundred yards wide. We know a little bit more about the river from
here east, because we have talked with men who have been here."

"I suppose we'll have to wait here until it runs down," said Jesse.

"Maybe not. If we were here earlier in the season and this were the
regular spring rise we might have to wait for some time before we
could go down with these boats. But the big flood has gone down long
ago. There isn't anything to hinder us as yet from dropping down and
watching carefully on ahead as we go."

Rob was again consulting his inevitable copy of _Mackenzie's Voyages_.

"It took Mackenzie and Fraser each of them just eight days to get this
far up the river from the west end of the Canyon of the Rocky
Mountains," said he. "Fraser must have built his boat somewhere west
of the Rocky Mountain Portage, as they call it. That must be
seventy-five miles east of here, as near as I can figure it from the
Mackenzie story, but Uncle Dick's friend, Mr. Hussey, said it was one
hundred and thirty miles--and only two big rapids, the Finlay and the
Parle Pas. I wish we could run it e