n into that ice water and pole a
boat or drag it for two or three hours before breakfast. Yet that's what
those poor men had to do. And three times they mention, between the
Forks and the mountains, the whole party had to wait breakfast till
somebody killed some meat. Anyhow, we've got some eggs and marmalade."

"Well, they got meat," demurred Jesse, seating himself as he laced his
shoes.

"Thanks to Drewyer, they usually did. He got five deer, one day, and
about every time he went out he hung up something. I think he'd got to
the front in the party now, next to Lewis and Clark. Chaboneau they
don't speak well of.

"Shields was a good man, and the two Fields boys. But, though Clark was
mighty sick, and Lewis got down, too, for a day or so, in here, they
were about the best men left. The others were wearing out by now.

"You see"--here Billy flipped a cake over in the pan--"they couldn't
have had much wool clothing left by now--they were in buckskin, and
buckskin is about as good as brown paper when it's wet. They had no
hobnails, and their broken, wet moccasins slipped all over those slick
round stones. You ever wade a trout stream, you boys?"

"I should say so!"

"Well, then you know how it is. While the water is below your knees you
can stand it quite a while. When it gets along your thighs you begin to
get cold. When it's waist deep, you chill mighty soon and can't stand it
long--though Lewis stripped and dived in eight feet of water to get an
otter he had shot. And slipping on wet rocks----"

"Don't we know about that! We waded up the Rat River, on the Arctic
Circle."

"You did! You've traveled like that? Well, then you can tell what the
men were standing here. They hadn't half clothes, a lot of them were
sick with boils and 'tumers,' as Clark calls them. Some were nearly
crippled. But in this water, ice water, waist deep, they had to get
eight boats up that big creek yonder--beaver meadows all along, so they
couldn't track. Sockets broke off their setting poles, so Captain Lewis,
he ties on some fish gigs he'd brought along. One way or another, they
got on up.

"They now began to get short rations, too. At first they couldn't get
any trout, or the whitefish--those fish with the 'long mouths' that
Lewis tells about. I'll bet they never tried grasshoppers. But along
above here they began to get fish, as the game got scarcer. Lewis tells
of setting their net for them."

"You certainly have been reading th