OKANAGAN'S ROAD The great cedar-boughs above the river bent beneath their load, and the scanty light was dimmed by sliding snow, when Seaforth and his comrade stood panting and white all over by the last portage.

Okanagan by dint of laborious searching had found the canoe jammed between two boulders with her side crushed in, and had spent a day repairing her with a flattened out meat-can and strips of deerskin.

The craft had notwithstanding this leaked considerably, but they made shift to descend the river in her, and now if they could accomplish the last big portage hoped by toiling strenuously to make the mouth of the canon by nightfall.
What they would do when they reached it neither of them knew, but they were too cold and jaded to concern themselves with more than the question how they were to convey their comrade over the boulders and through the thickets which divided them from the next stretch of comparatively untroubled water just then.

They had spent most of the day dragging the canoe round the rapid which roared down the hollow in a wild tumult of froth, lifting her with levers from rock to rock, and now and then sliding with her down a declivity, but that was a mode of progression clearly unsuited to an injured man.
Alton lay in the snow beneath a boulder that but indifferently sheltered him, and there was a little grim smile in his face as he looked up at his companions.
"Isn't it time you got hold of me?
We can't stop here all day," he said.
Okanagan turned, and stared sombrely at the wall of rock which dropped to the river close behind him, and the strip of boulders and great fallen fragments amidst which the undergrowth crept in and out between.
"There's a gully yonder, but if we worked back round the hillside I don't quite see how we're coming down," he said.
"No," said Alton dryly.

"I'm not good at flying.