ON THEIR OWNIt was quite a little flotilla that headed upriver a few days later. Five bidarkas, each manned by four Indians, carried supplies for a hundred days, the tools necessary for the building of a trading post, fish nets, and muskets and ammunition for the procuring of meat and repelling attacks of hostile Indians.
In a sixth bidarka, also manned by four Indians, rode the four white men, a carpenter having been included to superintend the erection of the new post. The first bend of the river plunged them into the primeval wilderness—a wilderness of spruce, of craggy mountains, of mighty glaciers, of cascading streamlets, and of deep land-locked lakes whose dark blue waters teemed with fish. Bands of mountain goats, white as the snow fields that splotched the heights, stared at them
