36 
^FOREST^ AND^ STREAM- 
tjAW. 9, 1904. 
did not lose caution. Often we would stop paddling 
and listen intently for a moment. If we heard nothing 
on we would go and presently we would notice that 
the current appeared to be swifter. Then we would 
listen again, and perhaps could detect a faint hum of 
falling water. We would proceed cautiously then, un- 
til we could see the white water ahead. Sometimes 
we ran them, after making an inspection. In fact, we 
ran everything in reason between Baysville and Brace- 
bridge. But there was one we thought about for a 
long time. We didn't run that one. As Hector says, 
"we could have easily enough, but what was the use?" 
We heard afterward about a man who tried to do it. 
He left a widow and two little boys. One can't be 
too careful on a strange river — or anywhere else. 
But sometimes we had to portage, and the portages 
on the South Branch are hard. The further down the 
river one gets the worse get the portages. The paths 
> — after one finds them — prove to be overgrown with 
bushes, and obstructed with fallen logs. Sometimes 
they lead through, the bush and often through low, 
swampy ground. Once we let the canoe down a rapid 
on a long rope. fastened to the stern, and ran along the 
shore jumping from rock to rock, keeping her off with 
a long pole. We got "eleven portages" down that 
day. At various points on the river attempts have 
been made to clear the land and farm it. But the class 
of settlers who, attracted by the offer of free land, and 
knowing nothing of farming, made these attempts, has 
proven to be weak in the flesh, although, perhaps (in 
some cases), of willing enough mind. We passed sev- 
eral of these "farms" that had been deserted, and the 
buildings upon them were falling to pieces. We camped 
that night at Fraserburg — consisting of two houses 
and a store — and I went to buy some milk at a melan- 
choly:^looking farm close at hand. As I approached, I 
saw: a man leaning in the doorway. In fact, the whole, 
place, had that lazy, uncared-for "leaning" appearance. 
A cow sleepily chewed, her cud while leaning against 
the ;--fence, and the fence, as though taking example 
from the living creatures, had half fallen upon the 
groupd. The yard was strewn with a great variety of 
rubbish, and the fields looked barren and starved. 
The man, himself, was a curious looking creature 
with a red face and an odd kind of side whisker. He 
wore a pair of gray flannel trousers, red flannel shirt 
and a felt hat with a feather in it. 
He jerked his head in the direction of the kitchen 
at rny request for milk. 
"She ain't milked yet," he replied, "she's doin' it 
now. Lizzie, fetch a chair out here!" 
"Oh, no thanks,"I hastened to say. "I -." 
"It ain't fer you, stranger. It's fer me," he. re- 
assured me, and to prove it he took the chair from 
the tired looking woman who had left her milking to 
fetch it, and sat upon it. 
"What time is it?" he asked suddenly. 
I told him. 
"I ain't seen the time fer three days," he continued. 
"Not since I was in Bracebridge. I got a watch in 
there, but she's broke. Has been since last fall. I 
got a good clock, too, but she's kind o' out o' kilter, 
and I ain't never bothered to have her fixed." 
"How do you know when dinner's ready?" I in- 
quired. 
"Smell it cookin'," was the unhesitating reply. 
. "How does your wife know when to cook it?" 
'Cooks it when she gets hungry." 
"I come here," he said, "twelve years ago. From 
Lampbellford I come. And I would a done better 
where I was.- But you see, I was out of a job about 
then and I got a free grant up here, and a fella kind 
o' has a home, ye see."' 
I saw. Such as it was, he undoubtedly had a home. 
A Bad One. 
"But I kind o' let things go," he continued. "What's 
the good of a man's killin' himself upon a place like 
this?" 
I admitted the imprudence of such a step. 
"Yaas," he agreed. "Lizzie, have you got that milk? 
The young fella's waitin'." 
"How are you rigged?" he asked, as I paid Lizzie 
and prepaid to depart. 
"For fishin'. How are you rigged?" 
I displayed the trawling line and spoon we had used 
on Hollow Lake, and the expert looked it over. 
"That all you got?" 
"That is all." 
He handed it back to me. "No," he announced, 
"you ain't rigged." 
I felt hurt. 
"I was goin' to say," he called after me, "that there 
was lots of speckled trout in that river. A fella can 
ketch all he's a mind to. But, pshaw! You ain't 
rigged! I used to fish meself once, but I don't now. 
A fella don't get time." 
And there I left him, sitting with his chair tilted 
against the house, his hat over his eyes. I caught 
sight of Lizzie, working at a piece of cord wood with a 
buck saw. 
I don't know what he thought of me, but from him 
I acquired a pretty keen insight into the cause of that 
country's desolateness. 
From Fraserburg to Bracebridge is nine miles by 
road. By river it must, I think, be more than twice 
that, but it is impossible to gauge it accurately, and 
nobody you ask can tell you. Distance, like time, 
would seem to be of no consequence. That is the 
difficulty of traveling on a river. We never knew how 
far we had gone. The distance is measured by por- 
tages. 
"Bill Jones lives four portages down," they told us, 
"and one, two — and eight more— that makes fourteen 
from here to the foot of the high falls." 
On Saturday we worked down to Muskoka Falls — 
three miles from Bracebridge by road. We had a fine 
day. The portages are not so hard below Fraserburg, 
and they are pleasantly interspersed with rapids, which 
can be run. 
In places the river was "choked" with logs. The cut 
had been unusually large and the river was exceeding- 
A Case of Portage. 
ly low. Even then , all the logs were not in the river 
pr our passage would have been helplessly blocked 
instead of occasionally inconvenienced. The great bulk 
of the timber was being held in the. streams on the 
other side of Lake of Bays, awaiting an opportunity 
to be towed across. A "head of water" was being held 
at Baysville to take them down. 
But here and there, where the river was shallow, the 
logs were stranded for nearly the entire width, and we 
carried over them to the free water. 
We camped that night just at the beginning of the 
last portage — one mile long — which would take us to 
the foot of the 200-foot fall. 
When we crawled out of the tent the next morning 
the sky was clouded and everything pointed to bad 
weather before long. It came in ten minutes. We ate 
our breakfast sitting in the tent while a drizzle went 
on outside, and as it showed no immediate signs of 
ceasing, we stayed where we were until it should. 
But, as this was the first and only bad weather we had 
experienced, we had very little to say about it. 
IDuring a temporary lull we pulled the tent down, 
made up the pack and started. It began again, pres- 
ently, as it always does under such circumstances, but 
we couldn't help that. We had to be home the next 
day. We carried the bags to the foot of the fall by a 
long, circuitous path through a farm and past a 
church (it was Sunday, too), and then made our second 
trip with the canoe on our heads. By the time we 
started paddling, we were unpleasantly damp, and then 
the rain, having done all possible mischief, stopped. 
The logs now filled one half of the river, but were, 
confined by a boom. The other half was perfectly 
clear, and as we paddled swiftly down, our spirits 
gradually rose, and we began to take a more optimistic 
view of things then when portaging in the rain. We 
had carried that canoe for the last time, and there 
was clear water to the lake — or should have been. 
"It is a fortunate thing for us," I began to say, "that 
these logs " 
I said no more. We had swung around a bend and 
the river ran straight before us. 
"Look there!" said Hector. . " 
I was looking. . 
The boom had come to an end, and the logs spread 
across the river in a brown mass, in even rows, like 
the teeth of a comb, and with as little proportionate 
intervening space. 
"Humph!" remarked Hector. There is a world of 
meaning in that word as he uses it. 
So we paddled to shore, pulled the canoe out and 
considered the situation. The case was this: It was 
impossible to go forward; we hadn't time to go back; 
being without a balloon we could not go up; lacking 
a submarine vessel, we could not go down. There was 
but one course left, and the absurdity of taking it 
seemed so apparent that we purposely left it to the 
last. This was to climb the hill and portage to Brace- 
bridge. The hill rose 90ft. above us. It was very 
steep and covered with bushes and fallen dead pine. 
A kind of cattle path began at the bottom and seemed 
to lose itself in a tangle of foliage half way up. 
"What shall we do?" Tasked. "Sit here and die?" 
"Sit here and have lunch," suggested Hector. So we 
sat in the mud and ate it. 
I felt irritated and out of patience. Why should we 
be inconvenienced in this way? What had we done to 
deserve such treatment? What reason had the owners 
of the logs for thinking they owned the river? And 
so on. I generally feel like this when at all put out. 
I can't explain it, and don't attempt to justify it. 
Not so Hector. He never loses his head. He is. al- 
ways cool and collected. He delights in seeing the 
difficulties multiply and takes infinite enjoyment in 
overcoming them. While walking along the boom he 
slipped and fell into the river. He scrambled out, 
whistling all the time, and presently engaged in the 
heart-breaking task of lighting a fire with wet wood 
and without paper. He was only moderately success- 
ful in this, producing nothing but great volumes of 
smoke. But he didn't mind. He sat on the smoke and 
put on dry socks and sweaters and wrung out his 
trousers. 
While Hector was drying himself, a man came down 
the cattle path. He had a fishing line set there, he told 
us, and had come to see to it. 
We presented the problem to him. We gave him the 
hypothesis just as it had occurred to us, and left him 
to find a solution. He sat upon his heels and drew 
diagrams in the mud with his forefinger. He presently 
announced a flaw in the hypothesis. 
"Yuz are goin' to have rough portagin' for a piece," 
he said. "There ain't any other way out of this except 
climbin' the hill to the road. There ain't no other way. 
Then keep down the road to the crick. You can 
paddle then, till you hit the fiats along the river again. 
Keep on over the flats under the railroad bridge, and 
the tail o' the jam's right there. I know, because I 
went that way all last summer, carried my dinner 
there in a tin pail when I worked in the mill. I 
guess it's a mile. Perhaps a mile and perhaps more 
than a mile. Yuz have a Peterboro likely?" 
• Yes, we had a Peterboro. (No other make is ever 
seen in 'that country.) 
"Oh, you're all right, then," he remarked cheer- 
fully, and left us. "You're good and light." 
"Do you think we'll ever come out of this mess?" I 
asked Hector. 
"Sure!" responded Hector. "We'll live to laugh at 
it." 
Whenever an acquaintance tells me of an impossible 
incident in which he has figured conspicuously and ex- 
pects me to match it with an experience of my own, I 
tell him of the time Hector and I carried around a log- 
jam on the South Muskoka one Sunday in May. I 
describe the incident as it was, without additions — and 
with few deductions. I mention the height and steep- 
ness of the hill, allude to the long, weary stretch of 
sand road, and touch upon the wide expanse of com- 
mon. I draw his attention to the weight of our packs 
and canoe. But I tell the truth, though I do not re- 
peat a little of the language we used at times, or dwell 
upon how utterly exhausted we were, when we dropped 
the canoe in the river once more. He might believe 
the story, then. 
"Weren't you tired?" he asks. 
"I had rather an ache in the neck," I reply. 
"I guess I'll be going," hg announces .after a pause. 
He doesn't believe me, and I am not troubled with him 
any more. 
That is why I don't tell about it here. 
But — don't go down the South Branch in the spring 
before the timber is out. 
If you still doubt me — then go. 
The river was now free beyond all doubt. There 
was a little current and we paddled swiftly down 
stream. We passed our camping spot of just two 
weeks before, and there on the bank was the label of 
the soup tablet. We reached the mouth of the river 
A little romance about these fellows. 
just at sundown and camped on the shore of the lake. 
This was our last night out. For another year we 
would be tied down to civilization and must sleep in 
a wooden bed. It was a most depressing thought, so 
we went early to our bed of spruce and slept to forget 
it. 
It was a glorious day the next morning when ; we 
paddled across the lake to the narrows. I felt rather 
blue, and even Hector didn't say much. If it had been 
raining I shouldn't have minded so much. We thought 
of the office next day and the rows of figures. We 
looked at three drivers working on a boom of timber. 
We stopped and watched them, and contrasted .their 
wholesome, healthy labor to our own drudgery. They 
worked in that slow, deliberate way that becomes like 
second nature to a man who works by the day without 
regard to the amount he accomplishes. But they 
seemed different to the lazy lot of water-soaked river- 
men of two weeks before, somehow. There did seem 
to be a little romance about these fellows as they bal- 
anced on the boom and worked at the logs with 
peevies. 
Presently one of them began to sing a little thing I 
remember singing when I attended kindergarten: 
"What is this the flowers say? 
"What is this the flowers say?— J 
