there was always heather, beautiful to look at
but slippery, uncertain footing for horse and man.

Twenty-five miles, broken with canter and trot, is not more than I have
frequently taken on a brisk sunny morning at home. But twenty-five miles
at a slow walk, now in a creek-bed, now on the edge of a cliff, is a
different matter. The last five miles of the Agnes Creek trip were a
long despair. We found and located new muscles that the anatomists have
overlooked.--A really first-class anatomist ought never to make a chart
without first climbing a high mountain and riding all day on the
creature alluded to in this song of Bob's, which gained a certain
popularity among the male members of the party.

"A sailor's life is bold and free.
He lives upon the bright blue sea.
He has to work like h----, of course,
But he doesn't have to ride on a darned old horse."

It was dark when we reached our camp-ground at the foot of the valley. A
hundred feet below, in a gorge, ran the Stehekin River, a noisy and
turbulent stream full of trout. We groped through the darkness for our
tents that night and fell into bed more dead than alive. But at three
o'clock the next morning, the junior Rineharts, following Mr. Fred, were
off for bear, reappearing at ten, after breakfast was over, with an
excited story of having seen one very close but having unaccountably
missed it.

There was no water for the horses at camp that night, and none for them
in the morning. There was no way to get them down to the river, and the
poor animals were almost desperate with thirst. They were having little
enough to eat even then, at the beginning of the trip, and it was hard
to see them without water, too.

XIII

CANON FISHING AND A TELEGRAM

It was eleven o'clock the next morning before I led Buddy--I had
abandoned "Budweiser" in view of the drought--into a mountain stream and
let him drink. He would have rolled in it, too, but I was on his back
and I fiercely restrained him.

The next day was a comparatively short trip. There was a trapper's cabin
at the fork of Bridge Creek in the Stehekin River. There we were to
spend the night before starting on our way to Cascade Pass. As it turned
out, we spent two days there. There was a little grass for the horses,
and we learned of a canon, some five or six miles off our trail, which
was reported as full of fish.

The most ardent of us went there the next day