st side, discharge their overflow through roaring and
precipitous streams to the Flathead, which flows south and east. While
our general direction was north, it was our intention to turn off east
and camp at the different lakes, coming back again to the wagon-trail to
resume our journey.

[Illustration: _Lake Elizabeth from Ptarmigan Pass, Glacier National
Park_]

Therefore, it became necessary, day after day, to take our boats off the
wagon-road and haul them along foot-trails none too good. The log of the
two boats is in itself a thrilling story. There were days and days
when the wagon was mired, when it stuck in the fords of streams or in
soft places on the trail. It was a land flotilla by day, and, with its
straw, a couch at night. And there came, toward the end of the journey,
that one nerve-racking day when, over a sixty-foot cliff down a
foot-trail, it was necessary to rope wagon, boats, and all, to get the
boats into the Flathead River.

But all this was before us then. We only knew it was summer, that the
days were warm and the nights cool, that the streams were full of trout,
that such things as telegraphs and telephones were falling far in our
rear, and that before us was the Big Adventure.

III

BRIDGE CREEK TO BOWMAN LAKE

The first night we camped at Bridge Creek on a river-flat. Beside us,
the creek rolled and foamed. The horses, in their rope corral, lay down
and rolled in sheer ecstasy when their heavy packs were removed. The
cook set up his sheet-iron stove beside the creek, built a wood fire,
lifted the stove over it, fried meat, boiled potatoes, heated beans, and
made coffee while the tents were going up. From a thicket near by came
the thud of an axe as branches were cut for bough beds.

I have slept on all kinds of bough beds. They may be divided into three
classes. There is the one which is high in the middle and slopes down at
the side--there is nothing so slippery as pine-needles--so that by
morning you are quite likely to be not only off the bed but out of the
tent. And there is the bough bed made by the guide when he is in a great
hurry, which consists of large branches and not very many needles. So
that in the morning, on rising, one is as furrowed as a waffle off the
iron. And there is the third kind, which is the real bough bed, but
which cannot be tossed off in a moment, like a poem, but must be the
result of calculation, time, and much labor. It is to this bough bed
that