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This operation is called "making a portage;" and as these portages vary from twelve yards to twelve miles in length, it may be readily conceived that a voyageur's life is not an easy one by any means. This, however, is only one of his difficulties. Rapids occur which are not so dangerous as to make a "portage" necessary, but are sufficiently turbulent to render the descent of them perilous.

"Have we got everything now, fellows?" asked Rob, making a last search before they left the scene of their disembarkation. "All set!" said John. "Here we go!" It required now but a few moments to make the second traverse of the portage, and soon the boats again were loaded.

We entered them by a portage of nine hundred and fifty paces, and during the afternoon traversed three other grassy lakes and encamped on the banks of the river, at the end of the Yellow-Knife Portage, of three hundred and fifty paces. This day's work was very laborious to our men.

All their lives he had been a good father to them, taking the place of the mother dead since she could just remember, speeding with tap and stroke of his humble craft those luckier ones who streamed through the stirring headquarters of Grand Portage at the mouth of Pigeon River each season, going into that untracked region of romance and dreams where the call of his still sturdy manhood had beckoned him, how long none might know.

With this decided expression of his sentiments, the stout hunter steered the canoe up alongside of a huge, flat rock, as if he were bent on giving a practical illustration of the latter part of his speech then and there. "We'd better camp now, Mister Charles; there's a portage o' two miles here, and it'll take us till sundown to get the canoe and things over." "Be it so," said Charley, landing.

The granddaughter presently made her appearance. She looked shyly at my husband from under her brows. "Do you know me, Thérèse?" he asked. "Yes, sir. It is Mr. Kinzie." "And do you know me also?" I said, approaching. She looked at me and shook her head. "No, I do not," she replied. "What, Thérèse! Have you forgotten Madame John, who taught you to read you and all the little girls at the Portage?"

Supper was nearly ready when they got back to Roaring Water Portage, but there were two or three customers in the store, and Katherine went to help her father with them, while Miles unharnessed and fed the four dogs.

The river runs between banks of very moderate elevation and on a regular slope, and although running with great rapidity upon a pebbly bed it is yet so tortuous that while its distance from its mouth to the Wagansis portage in a straight line is no more than 13 miles the meanders of its channel amount to 30.

We soon quitted the river and, after crossing a portage, a small lake and a point of land, came to the borders of the Mammawee Lake. We then found our error as to the strength of the wind, and that the gale still blew violently and there was so much drifting of the snow as to cover the distant objects by which our course could be directed.

I should confidently look to meet him in another ten years if threats of railroads spare the Far North so long girdled with the red sash, shod in silent moccasins, bending beneath the portage load, trolling Isabeau to the silent land somewhere under the Arctic Circle.