.

The feed was fairly good, our horses were feeling well, and curiously
enough the mosquitoes had quite left us. We overtook and passed a
number of outfits camped beside a splendid rushing stream.

On Burns' Lake we came suddenly upon a settlement of quite sizable
Indian houses with beautiful pasturage about. The village contained
twenty-five or thirty families of carrier Indians, and was musical
with the plaintive boat-songs of the young people. How long these
native races have lived here no one can tell, but their mark on the
land is almost imperceptible. They are not of those who mar the
landscape.

On the first of June we topped the divide between the two mighty
watersheds. Behind us lay the Fraser, before us the Skeena. The
majestic coast range rose like a wall of snow far away to the
northwest, while a near-by lake, filling the foreground, reflected
the blue ridges of the middle distance--a magnificent spread of wild
landscape. It made me wish to abandon the trail and push out into the
unexplored.

From this point we began to descend toward the Bulkley, which is the
most easterly fork of the Skeena. Soon after starting on our downward
path we came to a fork in the trail. One trail, newly blazed, led to
the right and seemed to be the one to take. We started upon it, but
found it dangerously muddy, and so returned to the main trail which
seemed to be more numerously travelled. Afterward we wished we had
taken the other, for we got one of our horses into the quicksand and
worked for more than three hours in the attempt to get him out. A
horse is a strange animal. He is counted intelligent, and so he is if
he happens to be a bronco or a mule. But in proportion as he is a
thoroughbred, he seems to lose power to take care of himself--loses
heart. Our Ewe-neck bay had a trace of racer in him, and being
weakened by poor food, it was his bad luck to slip over the bank into
a quicksand creek. Having found himself helpless he instantly gave up
heart and lay out with a piteous expression of resignation in his big
brown eyes. We tugged and lifted and rolled him around from one
position to another, each more dangerous than the first, all to no
result.

While I held him up from drowning, my partner "brushed in" around him
so that he _could_ not become submerged. We tried hitching the other
horses to him in order to drag him out, but as they were
saddle-horses, and had never set shoulder to a collar in their
lives, they