along the bank on
foot. The trapper carries his pack with a strap round his forehead.
The miner ropes his round under his shoulders. He wants hands and neck
free for climbing. Usually the prospectors would appoint a rendezvous.
There, provisions would be slung in the trees above the reach of
marauding beasts, and the party would disperse at daybreak, each to
search in a different direction, blazing trees as he went ahead so that
he could find the way back at night to the camp. Distress or a find
was to be signalled by a gunshot or by heliograph of sunlight on a
pocket mirror; but many a man strayed beyond rescue of signal and never
returned to his waiting 'pardners.' Some were caught in snowslides,
only to be dug out years later.

Many signs guided the experienced prospector. Streams clear as crystal
came, he knew, from upper snows. Those swollen at midday {21} came
from near-by snowfields. Streams milky or blue or peacock green came
from glaciers--ice grinding over rock.

Heavy mists often added to the dangers. I stood at the level of eight
thousand feet in this region once with one of the oldest prospectors of
the canyon. He had been a great hunter in his day. A cloud came
through a defile of the peaks heavy as a blanket. Though we were on a
well-cut bridle-trail, he bade us pause, as one side of the trail had a
sheer drop of four thousand feet in places. 'Before there were any
trails, how did you make your way here to hunt the mountain goat when
this kind of fog caught you?' I asked.

'Threw chips of stone ahead and listened,' he answered, 'and let me
tell you that only the greenest kind of tenderfoot ever takes risks on
a precipice.'

And nine men out of ten were such green tenderfoots that winter of
'58-'59, when five thousand prospectors overran the wild canyons and
precipices of the Fraser. Two or three things the prospector always
carried with him--matches, a knife, a gun, rice, flour, bacon, and a
little mallet-shaped hammer to test the 'float.' What was the 'float'?
A sandy chunk of gravel perhaps flaked with {22} yellow specks the size
of a pin-head. He wanted to know where that chunk rolled down from.
He knocked it open with his mallet. If it had a shiny yellow pebble
inside only the size of a pea, the miner would stay on that bank and
begin bench diggings into the dry bank. By the spring of '59 dry bench
diggings had extended back fifty miles from the river. If the chunk
revealed on