and Piet Dumont and the other man returned
and made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe was
warmed a little, he said:

"There's a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn't too hard to
get up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a big
bowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom,
once. The wind isn't so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom or
whatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place to
make a camp, if it wasn't so far from the boat."

"How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?" Joe
asked, going on to explain what he had in mind.

"Why, easy. I don't think it would be nearly as hard as the place
Ramon found."

"Neither do I," the mate agreed. "Climbing up that waterfall down the
stream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping one
over beside the one above." He began zipping up his parka. "Let's get
the cutter and the lifters and go up now."

"Wait till I warm up a little, and I'll go with you," Abe said.

Then he came over to where Cesario and Tom and I were working, to see
what we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midget
screwdrivers and things Tom was making.

"I'll take that back, Ramon," he said. "I can do a lot more good right
here. Have you taken any of the radio navigational equipment apart,
yet?" he asked us.

We hadn't. We didn't know anything about it.

"Well, I think we can get some stuff out of the astrocompass that can
be used. Let me in here, will you?"

I got up. "You take over for me," I said. "I'll go on the
wood-chopping detail."

Tom wanted to go, too; Abe told him to keep on with his toolmaking.
Piet Dumont said he'd guide us, and Glenn Murell said he'd go along.
There was some swapping around of clothes and we gathered up the two
lifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream.

The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but not
quite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to help
us. The worst difficulty, and the worst danger, was from the wind.

Once we were at the top, though, it wasn't so bad. We went a couple of
hundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto the
old lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights would
shine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branches
growing out of the tops.

We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hanging