s enough uncertainty and
risk about it to lend a special charm. Just as the best of fishing is
the unknown possibility of the next cast--your biggest trout may rise to
the fly!--so it is when you drift down stream in a canoe, for every
turn discloses a fresh vista and behind every bend lurks some rare
surprise. It may be an unsuspected rapid, requiring prompt action;
perhaps a tree has fallen across the river, necessitating a flanking
portage or a hazardous scurry beneath it; mayhap a particularly inviting
pool will appear, when one must "put on the brakes" and "full speed
astern" ever so hastily before a fatal shadow spoils the fishing
chances. There are other possibilities without number, some of them
realities for us, as when we came face to face with a deer, to our vast
mutual astonishment, or, quietly drifting down upon a madam duck and her
fluffy feathered family, gave them all violent hysterics. The little
birds were unable to fly, and the mother, who would not desert them and
lacked courage to hide along the bank, herded her family down stream for
many miles with heartbreaking squawks and much splashing of wings.

A portage is either one of the interesting events of a canoe trip or its
most despised hardship, according to the disposition of those
concerned--not to mention the length, breadth, and thickness of the
portage itself! Regarded in its most pessimistic light, a portage is a
necessary evil, and, like a burned bannock, is swallowed with good grace
by the initiated. In Eastern Canada, the land of _patois_ French, a
portage is a portage. In Maine, and elsewhere, it is apt to be a
"carry." West of the Rockies, one neither "portages" nor "carries," but
"packs" the canoe, for on the Pacific Slope everything borne by man or
beast is "packed," just as it is "toted" south of the Mason and Dixon
line. But portage, carry, or pack, the results are the same. Reduced to
their lowest equation, it usually means a sore back and a prodigious
appetite--there should be a superlative for prodigious, as all camping
appetites are that; dare one say "prodigiouser"?

Our hundred miles of river included but two portages of consequence,
both around falls. Fortunately in each instance the packing was across a
comparatively level stretch, free from underbrush, as is almost all of
this great belt of yellow pine that follows the eastern slopes of the
Cascades from the Columbia to California. There were minor carries, once
over a low