254 Sport and Life. 



it would certainly require a steam launch to draw the plough. The 

 Minister smiled benignly at my feeble joke, and, to the utter 

 consternation of the Montreal Customs authorities, I returned from 

 Ottawa with a permit in my pocket authorising me to clear in the 

 launch free of duty, as a settler's agricultural implement. I was 

 told subsequently that this was quite an unique instance, and 

 deserved being put in "a glass case." 



When the steam launch -arrived at Sandpoint on its two long 

 trucks, I was startled by its size out of water. The trail, which at 

 that time led over the Pack River Pass to Dick Fry's, was about 

 the crookedest, narrowest, and most " up and down " path through 

 dense forest imaginable, and it seemed an utterly impossible job to 

 take this craft, though lightened of its somewhat old-fashioned 

 heavy boiler and machinery, which we took out before loading her 

 on the cars at Duluth, across this pass in the Selkirk range. A 

 large force of Kootenay Indians and some ten or twelve white men, 

 assisted by stout tackle and pulleys, at last managed the business, 

 though it took upwards of three weeks and cost an unconscionable 

 sum. For the greater part of the forty miles the present good 

 waggon road, by taking a straight course, has cut down the 

 distance by two-fifths the hull was carried bodily by the men ; 

 while on the steep hills, where she could not be carried, we pulled 

 her up or let her down on rollers with pulleys fastened to trees. 

 On one such occasion, when we were letting her down a very steep 

 hill, one of the ropes broke just as I was lying on my stomach 

 underneath the bow of the hull, fixing the rollers. Fortunately for 

 me, these rollers, which consisted of barked logs cut from a tree, 

 were more than a foot in diameter, and the squeeze I got as the 

 hull skidded over me was not very serious, but it was a decidedly 

 unpleasant sensation. The hull was brought up at the foot of the 

 hill by a bank of clay soil, into which she buried her bow, " hurting 

 the bank more severely than she did herself or the boss," as the 

 men observed, after they had helped me to my legs and seen that 

 I had escaped from what at the moment they imagined meant 

 instant death. 



