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Updated: June 20, 2025
The early morning was cold, and a heavy dew dampened everything outside the awning. Just before daybreak, we had reached the beginning of the first large lagoon. Here our sail was hoisted, though it was of little use, while we poled along near shore, following all the long curves. Our first stop, on account of a norther, was exciting; from the anxiety of the men, we expected to be instantly upset.
We found plenty of fine ducks, two bee trees, and caught some cat-fish with a hook and line we got at the mill. We also caught some otter, and, on a little branch of the river killed two bears, the skin of one of them weighing five pounds. We met a keel boat being poled up the river, and with the last cent of money we possessed bought a little flour of them.
Long and narrow dugouts, as light and swift as the string-test gigs of civilisation, paddled or poled, were gliding with extraordinary speed down the channel near the bank. Riding then a little way, we dismounted under a magnificent banyan tree, one of the finest specimens, I should think, in the world. Ponies and men were dwarfed into Lilliputians under the amazing canopy of its branches.
Harry poled the boat along quite easily through the shallow water, and when he got farther out he found that he proceeded with still greater ease, only he did not go straight across, but went a little too much down stream. But he pushed out strongly toward the opposite shore, and soon reached the middle of the creek. Then he began to go down stream very fast indeed.
He leaped over the recumbent forms of Eph and Sam and dashed down the path to the place where he had beached his boat. He jumped on board and poled off just as young Masterson reached the shore and pulled himself out of the water. "You infernal young spy!" shrieked Masterson, beside himself with rage, "I'll get even with you for this, see if I don't!"
"You know, Sam," said the girl, thoughtfully, "that he might have poled up stream a way, put the chest ashore, and then let the punt drift down." "Reckon that's so," grunted the foreman. He said no more, and neither did Frances. But the brief dialogue gave the girl food for thought, and her mind was quite full of the idea when the crowd from the Edwards ranch came into view.
There stretched before us Mountain Cat Lake, for beauty, a gem in its setting of hills. It was half a mile wide and two miles long. In the lower part were two small wooded islands, but the upper part was clear. Long spruce covered points reached out into its waters, which still flowed so swiftly that instead of paddling we poled along the shore.
Where rivers had to be crossed, the men built rude rafts and poled themselves over, with their pack-horses swimming behind. Those who had oxen killed the oxen and sold the beef. Others breasted the mill-race of the Fraser in canoes and dugouts. Governor Douglas estimated that before April of '59 as many as three hundred boats with five men in each had ascended the Fraser.
They cut directly across the swamp and emerged, hot, sticky, and dirty, only a few yards from the boat. They stowed the equipment wordlessly, then poled backwards into the wider channel. It was too narrow to turn, so Rick started the motor and backed out with great caution.
At the end of the first day they left the main current of the river, and poled eastwards by a network of creeks leading to the village from which their boatmen came. For the most part the water-way was very solitary. Here and there they passed a village, but, as a rule, no life, save that of wild animals, was to be seen.
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