aminess like a haughty cry in a silence.

A wilderness indeed! It seemed that waste land of which Tennyson sang,
"where no man comes nor hath come since the making of the world." I
thought of the steamboats and the mackinaws and the keel-boats and the
thousands of men who had pushed through this dream-world and the thought
was unconvincing. Fairies may have lived here, indeed; and in the youth
of the world, a glad young race of gods might have dreamed gloriously
among the yellow crags. But surely we were the first men who had ever
passed that way--and should be the last.

Suddenly the light breeze boomed up into a gale. The _Atom_, with
bellying sail, leaped forward down the roughening water, swung about a
bend, raced with a quartering wind down the next reach, shot across
another bend--and lay drifting in a golden calm. Still above us the
great wind buzzed in the crags like a swarm of giant bees, and the
waters about us lay like a sheet of flawless glass.

With paddles we pushed on lazily for an hour. At the next bend, where
the river turned into the west, the great gale that had been roaring
above us, suddenly struck us full in front. Sucking up river between the
wall rocks on either side, its force was terrific. You tried to talk
while facing it, and it took your breath away. In a few minutes, in
spite of our efforts with the paddles, we lay pounding on the shallows
of the opposite shore.

We got out. Two went forward with the line and the third pushed at the
stern. Progress was slow--no more than a mile an hour. The clear water
of the upper river is always cold, and the great wind chilled the air.
Even under the August noon it took brisk work to keep one's teeth from
chattering. The bank we were following became a precipice rising sheer
from the river's edge, and the water deepened until we could no longer
wade. We got in and poled on to the next shallows, often for many
minutes at a time barely holding our own against the stiff gusts. For
two hours we dragged the heavily laden boat, sometimes walking the bank,
sometimes wading in mid-stream, sometimes poling, often swimming with
the line from one shallow to another. And the struggle ended as suddenly
as it began. Upon rounding the second bend the head wind became a stern
wind, driving us on at a jolly clip until nightfall.

During the late afternoon, we came upon a place where the Great Northern
Railroad touches the river for the last time in five hundred miles