After easily slaughtering one bear, the travellers had a far more
interesting season with another, who was allured to the scene by the smell
of jerking meat, and who gave them a very lively half hour of it, it being
hard to say which was the most hunted, the bruin or the humans.

"Look a' that now!" groaned Sweeny, when the victory had been secured.
"The baste has chawed up me gun barrl loike it was a plug o' tobacky."

"Throw it away," ordered Thurstane, after inspecting the twisted and
lacerated musket.

Tenderly and tearfully Sweeny laid aside the first gun that he had ever
carried, went again and again to look at its mangled form as if it were a
dead relative, and in the end raised a little mausoleum of cobble-stones
over it.

"If there was any whiskey, I'd give um a wake," he sighed. "I'm a pratty
soldier now, without a gun to me back."

"I'll let ye carry mine when we come to foot it," suggested Glover.

"Yis, an' ye may carry me part av the boat," retorted Sweeny.

The bear meat was tough and musky, but it could be eaten, must be eaten,
ind was eaten. During the time required for jerking a quantity of it,
Glover made a boat out of the two hides, scraping them with a hunting
knife, sewing them with a sailor's needle and strands of the
sounding-line, and stretching them on a frame of green saplings, the
result being a craft six feet long by nearly four broad, and about the
shape of a half walnut-shell. The long hair was left on, as a protection
against the rocks of the river, and the seams were filled and plastered
with bear's grease.

"It's a mighty bad-smellin' thing," remarked Sweeny. "An who's goin' to
back it over the portages?"

"Robinson Crusoe!" exclaimed Glover. "I never thought of that. Wal, let's
see. Oh, we kin tow her astarn in plain sailin', 'n' when we come to a
cataract we can put Sweeny in an' let her slide."

"No ye can't," said Sweeny. "It's big enough, an' yet it won't howld um,
no more'n a tayspoon'll howld a flay."

"Wal, we kin let her slide without a crew, 'n' pick her up arterwards,"
decided Glover.

We must hasten over the minor events of this remarkable journey. The
travellers, towing the bearskin boat behind the Buchanan, passed the mouth
of Canon Bonito, and soon afterward beheld the San Juan swallowed up in
the Grand River, a far larger stream which rises in the Rocky Mountains
east of Utah. They swept by the horrible country of the Utes and Payoches,
without holding i