Let's be off!" cried Fred, springing up.

First of all, however, they repaired their tattered boots by folding
pieces of the raw deerhide round them and lashing them in place with
thongs. It was clumsy work at the best; but Mac rolled up the rest of
the hide to take with him, in case they should have to make further
repairs.

Horace consulted the map and the compass again, and picked up the lump
of venison, which, with the deerskin, constituted their only luggage.
In less than half an hour from the time Fred had hit upon his plan they
were off, running through the undergrowth on the twenty-five-mile race
to the Smoke River.

None of them knew what sort of country the course would pass over. The
map for that part of the region was incomplete and no more than
approximately accurate, so that the boys were not at all sure that
their guess at the distance to the Smoke River was correct. But they
did know that now that they had started on the race, their lives
depended upon their winning it. Fred took the lead at once, tearing
through the thickets, tripping, stumbling.

"Easy, there!" called Horace. "We mustn't do ourselves up at the
start."

Fred slackened his pace somewhat, but continued to keep in front. For
nearly a mile from the river the land sloped gently upward through
dense thickets of birch. Then the birches thinned, and finally gave
way to evergreen, and the rising ground became rough with gravel and
rock. The slope changed to undulating billows of hills, covered with
stone of every size, from gravel to small boulders, and over it all
grew a stubbly jungle of cedar and jack-pine, seldom more than six feet
high.

It was a rough, broken country, and the boys had to slacken their pace
somewhat; to make things worse, it presently began to rain. First came
a driving drizzle, then a heavy downpour, with a strong southwest wind.
The rocks streamed with water, and the boys were drenched; but the
heavy rain presently settled again to a soaking drizzle that threatened
to continue all day.

Through the rain they struggled ahead; sometimes they found a clear
space where they could run; sometimes they came upon wet, tangled
shrubbery that impeded them sadly. They kept hoping for easier
traveling; but those broken, rocky hills stretched ahead for miles. At
last the trees became even more sparse, and the boys encountered a
whole hillside covered with a mass of split rock.

Over this litter of sandstone they