We held council around our campfire, and after a discussion of the situation decided that our wisest course would be to make up packs consisting of a tent, a blanket for each, an ax, provisions¸cooking utensils and the necessary implements for cutting the inscription in the rock, cache the remaining outfit including the canoe, and cross directly to the Susan River valley.  It may be explained that after the loss of our cooking and culinary outfit we had improvised a new one, utilizing dehydrated vegetable tins for mixing pan and tea and cooking pails, copper wire for cooking and tea pails, friction tops from the vegetable tins for plates, and condensed coffee cans, with bent birch wood handles wired upon them, for cups.

We had hardly arrived at a decision to adopt this course, when Murdock and Henry were discovered working their way up the river.  It was a great relief to see them, for we had felt considerable concern for their safety, and we hurried down to greet them and to laugh at the battered appearance which they presented.  Both were barefooted, their clothing was in disrepair, their faces were streaked with tar from copious applications of fly dope, varied with splotches of blood, where flies had found an opening for attack.  They looked, indeed, like old campaigners returning from a hard fought field.  They had been working early and late to overtake us, and were delighted when they glimpsed our little white tent among the trees.  Poppy had accompanied them to Grand Lake, and even he was bedraggled and tired, but not too tired to rush to Gilbert and express the keenest pleasure while his master fondled him.

“What’s the river like above here?” asked Henry, when the boys, who were as hungry as two bear cubs, sat down to a hurried meal which Gilbert prepared for them.

“It’s hell and twenty!” answered the Judge.

“Hell and twenty! Exclaimed Murdock, much pleased with the description.  “That’s what she’s been all day from the Charles Riley River up, and that’s what we calls her from now on—Hell and Twenty Rapid.”

“That’s a good name for her,” said Gilbert laughing. “We’ll give it out down to the post that Hell and Twenty’s her name, and that she runs for forty miles whatever, and maybe fifty, above the Charles Riley River.”

“None of  ’em will ever come up to look at her,” volunteered Henry.  “They’ll never comes this far before they turns back.  I wouldn’t have stuck to her so long if I hadn’t promised.  I’ll never go on a river again I don’t know anything about.”

With the decision to abandon the river, we had no further need of the assistance of Murdock and Henry, and they were very glad indeed when they were informed they might now return to Northwest River.  The opportunity to send to the outside the first written word, however sketchy it might be, of our progress and welfare, could not be overlooked.  In the absence of suitable writing materials, inner parchment stripped from birch bark proved to be an excellent substitute for paper.  In the tent, sheltered from the flies, the Judge and I wrote several letters home, which we asked the boys to deliver to the mail boat at Northwest River.  That night a drizzling rain began and was still falling when the two young voyageurs shook our hands and turned down the river to be quickly swallowed up by the mist.

Next: Chapter XXX: Backpacking To The Susan