even answer questions from Mary in
their own tongue.

The fourth Kakisa, however, an incredibly ragged and dirty old man with
a dingy cotton fillet around his snaky locks, hailed them with wild
shouts of laughter, paddled to meet them, and clung to the dug-out,
fondly stroking Stonor's sleeve. The sight of Clare caused him to go off
into fresh shrieks of good-natured merriment. His name, he informed
them, was Lookoovar, or so they understood it. He had a stomach-ache, he
said, and wished for some of the white man's wonderful stomach-warming
medicine of which he had heard.

"It seems that our principal claim to fame up here is whisky," said
Stonor.

He gave the old man a pill. Lookoovar swallowed it eagerly, but looked
disappointed at the absence of immediate results.

All these men were hunting their dinners. Close to the shore they
paddled softly against the current, or drifted silently down, searching
the bushes with their keen flat eyes for the least stir. Since
everything had to come down to the river sooner or later to drink, they
could have had no better point of vantage. Every man had a gun in his
canoe, but ammunition is expensive on the Swan River, and for small fry,
musk-rat, duck, fool-hen, or rabbit, they still used the prehistoric bow
and arrow.

"The Swan River is like the Kakisas' Main Street," said Stonor. "All day
they mosey up and down looking in the shop-windows for bargains in
feathers and furs."

They camped for the night on a cleared point occupied by the bare poles
of several tepees. The Indians left these poles standing at all the best
sites along the river, ready to use the next time they should spell that
way. They frequently left their caches too, that is to say, spare gear,
food and what-not, trustfully hanging from near-by branches in
birch-bark containers. The Kakisas even tote water in bark pails.

Next day the character of the river changed. It now eddied around
innumerable short bends right and left with an invariable regularity,
each bend so like the last they lost all track of the distance they had
come. Its course was as regularly crooked as a crimping-iron. On each
bend it ate under the bank on the outside, and deposited a bar on the
inside. On one side the pines toppled into the water as their footing
was undermined, while poplars sprang up on the other side in the
newly-made ground.

On the afternoon of this day they suddenly came upon the village of
which they had been