le. The ground had now hardened so that a wanigan boat was
unnecessary. Instead, the camp outfit was transported in waggons, which
often had to journey far inland, to make extraordinary detours, but
which always arrived somehow at the various camping places. Orde and his
men, of course, took the river trail.

The river trail ran almost unbroken for over a hundred miles of
meandering way. It climbed up the high banks at the points, it crossed
the bluffs along their sheer edges, it descended to the thickets in
the flats, it crossed the swamps on pole-trails, it skirted the great,
solemn woods. Sometimes, in the lower reaches, its continuity was broken
by a town, but always after it recovered from its confusion it led on
with purpose unvarying. Never did it desert for long the river. The
cool, green still reaches, or the tumbling of the white-water, were
always within its sight, sometimes beneath its very tread. When
occasionally it cut in across a very long bend, it always sent from
itself a little tributary trail which traced all the curves, and
returned at last to its parent, undoubtedly with a full report of its
task. And the trail was beaten hard by the feet of countless men, who,
like Orde and his crew, had taken grave, interested charge of the river
from her birth to her final rest in the great expanses of the Lake. It
is there to-day, although the life that brought it into being has been
gone from it these many years.

In midsummer Orde found the river trail most unfamiliar in appearance.
Hardly did he recognise it in some places. It possessed a wide,
leisurely expansiveness, an indolent luxury, a lazy invitation born of
broad green leaves, deep and mysterious shadows, the growth of ferns,
docks, and the like cool in the shade of the forest, the shimmer of
aspens and poplars through the heat, the green of tangling vines, the
drone of insects, the low-voiced call of birds, the opulent splashing of
sun-gold through the woods, quite lacking to the hard, tight season in
which his river work was usually performed. What, in the early year,
had been merely a whip of brush, now had become a screen through whose
waving, shifting interstices he caught glimpses of the river flowing
green and cool. What had been bare timber amongst whose twigs and
branches the full daylight had shone unobstructed, now had clothed
itself in foliage and leaned over to make black and mysterious the water
that flowed beneath. Countless insects ho