on the lonely shore whence white-man tread and white-man voices had departed long ago. The tepees were used as a half-way camp by the Dog Ribs and Yellow Knives going into Fort Resolution for the yearly Treaty Payments, and the signs of recent occupation were plain on them. Dick prowled through their dirty silences that night; but he found nothing of moment except a puppy with a broken leg. He put the leg into adequate splints and fed to it the raw moosemeat brought from the Fort; and Tempest, seeing, marvelled as he had so often marvelled before, at the strong line of distinction which this man drew between human nature and the animal.
The black flies and the mosquitoes hailed them before the sun shot up to presage a hot, airless day. And then, under the blaze of it and attended by a mighty murmuring, stabbing army, they began that portaging which was to stay with them in larger or lesser degree throughout the rest of the journey.
The three-mile portage over the divide that parted the two lakes had been beaten hard by the passing of the fur hunters through uncounted years on their way to Fort Resolution. It lay between low close forest where the mosquitoes hung like an awning, and it climbed a six-hundred feet slope in the sun where the blackflies made patterns on the white stony earth. In four days they had travelled a distance of over sixty miles across that three-mile portage; and Myers vented some opinions as he flung the list tightly-rolled pack on the crest of the divide where the little lake lay, and rubbed the aching muscles of his neck.
"I'm thinkin' as it were some joker called us the Mounted Police," he said. "We're 'orses, bloomin' 'orses, that's what we are. An' this darned strap"—he pulled viciously at the leather loop which hung from his Stetson hat to the curve of the skull—"this are our bridle, on'y we hadn't oughter be wearin* it behind."
Depache, the tall French-Canadian, eased his shoulders from the pressure of the canoe-paddles which had been strapped across the canoe-thwarts so as to enable him to carry the whole thing on his head.
"Bien," he said. "You will soon not be so fat. I did never see a man sweat as you do sweat. It is wonderful."
