summer, but I don't think it. There's nothing but the smooth of the
water to wear those logs until they begin to rot."

Quite cheerfully they took up their long, painstaking journey back
down the river.

Travel down the river was at times very pleasant, and at times very
disagreeable. 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