"I'll try un," he muttered, and settled again to his oars.

But try as he would Eli could not force his light craft against the
wind, and at length he reluctantly dropped back again under the lee
of the land and went ashore.

"There'll be no goin' on to-day," he admitted. "I'll have to make camp
whatever."

Under the shelter of the thick spruce forest where he was fended from
the gale and drive of the rain, he cut a score of poles. One of them,
thicker and stiffer than the others, he lashed between two trees at a
height of perhaps four feet. At intervals of three or four inches he
rested the remaining poles against the one lashed to the trees,
arranging them at an angle of fifty-five degrees and aligning the
butts of the poles evenly upon the ground. These he covered with a
mass of boughs and marsh grass as a thatching. The roof thatched to
his satisfaction, he broke a quantity of boughs and with some care
prepared a bed under the lean-to.

His shelter and bed completed, he cut and piled a quantity of dry logs
at one end of the lean-to. Then he felled two green trees and cut the
trunks into four-foot lengths. Two of these he placed directly in
front of the shelter and two feet apart, at right angles to the
shelter. Across the ends of the logs farthest from his bed he piled
three of the green sticks to serve as a backlog, and in front of
these lighted his fire. When it was blazing freely he piled upon it,
and in front of the green backlogs, several of the logs of dry wood.