Beyond them lay an unknown country, but you had to climb
cruelly to see it, and you couldn't gain above what you already had in
any case. The nearest settlement was nearly sixty miles away, so even
added isolation had not its usual quickening effect on camper's effort.
The River is visited by few, anyway. An occasional adventurous steam
yacht pauses at the mouth, fishes a few little ones from the shallow
pools there, or a few big ones from the reefs, and pushes on. It never
dreams of sending an expedition to the interior. Our own people, and
two other parties, are all I know of who visit the River regularly. Our
camp-sites alone break the forest; our blazes alone continue the
initial short cut of the Fur Trail; our names alone distinguish the
various pools. We had always been satisfied to compromise with the
frowning Hills. In return for the delicious necks and points and forest
areas through which our clipped trails ran, we had tacitly respected
the mystery of the upper reaches.
This year, however, a number of unusual conditions changed our spirit.
I have perhaps neglected to state that our trip up to now had been a
rather singularly damp one. Of the first fourteen days twelve had been
rainy. This was only a slightly exaggerated sample for the rest of the
time. As a consequence we found the River filled even to the limit of
its freshet banks. The broad borders of stone beach between the
stream's edge and the bushes had quite disappeared; the riffles had
become rapids, and the rapids roaring torrents; the bends boiled
angrily with a smashing eddy that sucked air into pirouetting cavities
inches in depth.
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