C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

A Turning Point 123More than once we saw moose tracks in the mud. All day the mosquitoes werevicious as ever, but the river no longer seemed like an enemy and we were nowmaking a better pace, averaging perhaps a mile an hour.Mter the ever welcome spell for lunch we came out from among those foldedhills into beautiful open country. Already we were soaked up to the knees afterwading through muskeg, willow and alder thickets, to say nothing of small creeks,and now there came a shower of rain that soaked us down to the knees. Afteranother campfire and tea at 5, we went on again. Rain clouds were driving acrossthe mountains ahead of us, but the nearer green slopes were sunlit and here andthere through a break in the clouds we could see blue summits and patches ofsnow. Once again we felt that the country was a paradise save for the mosquitoes.Towards the end of the day we noticed that the river was much narrower.Lazarus was unflagging as ever. He had been up until after midnight on theprevious evening, mending his moccasins, but there had been no word of grumblingwhen we woke him at 6: 30. At last we settled into bed on a stony spit of sandon the left bank. Through our mosquito bar and the tent opening we could see awonderful mountain range. We had covered the stony ground with wet poplarshoots for our bed, and then outside our sleeping bags we laid our wringing wetcoats and breeches, trusting that our body warmth would dry them. The highlightsof that day had been the moment when we found a small Arcticrhododendron plant in seed, and another moment when we came suddenly on abeautiful yellow poppy, with finely cut glaucous blue leaves, growing on a stonyflat.It is not easy now to separate, in one's memory, our last three camps on theRat River before we came out into open country. There was Barrier River campwith its bed of sand; there was the camp of wet poplar-shoots and sodden clotheson a stony spit of land; and there was an island camp on yet another bed ofstones. The three are all telescoped in my mind, sharp details being lost in acertain feeling of relief from an oppression of which we had hardly been awareduring our early step-by-step struggle up the river. There was not only theunspoken fear that we might never stay the course, there was also a physicaloppression from being so shut in while following that river bed. The weather hadbeen warm and we had always been enclosed, if not actually imprisoned, bythickets or trees or hills with mud rivers on their faces and day after day ourefforts failed to bring us to an outlet. All this had only been sub-conscious, foractually we were happy as we struggled up the Rat, secure in the knowledge that