e boulders during most of it.
The hillsides above them were steep and almost unclimbable, and no man
could have driven a canoe upstream amidst the grinding ice-cake which
cumbered the river, that was frozen still in its slower reaches. There
they found better travelling through the slush that covered the rotten
ice, but those reaches were few and short, and they went back to the
boulders when the swollen river burst its bonds again.

It came down in savage tumult between the rocks, whose heads just
showed above the foam, and its banks were further cumbered by a
whitened driftwood frieze over which the men must clamber warily,
clawing for a foothold on the great battered trunks, or smashing
through a tangle of brittle limbs. At times they were stopped
altogether by a maze of washed-up timber no man could struggle through,
and the axes were plied for an hour or more before they went on again.

The second day was like the first one, though their toil was if
anything more arduous still, and on the evening of the fourth they
came, worn out, dripping, and dejected, to a spot where the valley
narrowed in. A strip of forest divided the rock from the river on the
opposite shore, but between them and it a confusion of froth and foam
swirled down, while the hillsides seemed to vibrate with the roar of
the rapid. One glance sufficed to show that the crossing was wholly
impossible for either beast or man. On their side of the river a wall
of rock hemmed the little party in, and even Seaforth wondered, while
Okanagan growled half-aloud, when Alton, knee-deep in water, plodded
steadily on. There was not more than another hour's daylight, and
Seaforth remembered that the gorge extended for a league or so, while
the flood had spread across it in front of them, but he knew his
comrade and said nothing. Presently he slipped from a boulder, and
sank almost shoulder-deep in a whirling pool, but somebody grabbed his
arm, and after a breathless flounder he felt the shingle under him and
the froth lapped only to his knee. Then they crawled amidst the
driftwood which washed up and down beneath them, tearing garments and
lacerating limbs, until they stood once more panting on dry shingle,
with a broad stretch of froth before them, and the light growing dim.

The river had spread from side to side of the constricted valley, and
the crash of the ice it brought down rang hollowly from rock to rock
until it was lost high up amidst the clim