The man was a half-breed.  Three days later they left Hudson’s Hope, with Baree riding amidships.  The mountains loomed up swiftly after this, and the second day they were among them.  After that it was slow work fighting their way up against the current of the Finly.  It was tremendous work.  It seemed to David that half their time was spent amid the roar of rapids.  Twenty-seven times within five days they made portages.  Later on it took them two days to carry their canoe and supplies around a mountain.  Fifteen days were spent in making eighty miles.  Easier travel followed then.  It was the twentieth of June when they made their last camp before reaching the Kwadocha.  The sun was still up; but they were tired, utterly exhausted.  David looked at his map and at the figures in the notebook he carried.  He had come close to fifteen hundred miles since that day when he and Father Roland and Mukoki had set out for the Cochrane.  Fifteen hundred miles!  And he had less than a hundred more to go!  Just over those mountains—­somewhere beyond them.  It looked easy.  He would not be afraid to go alone, if old Towaskook refused to help him.  Yes, alone.  He would find his way, somehow, he and Baree.  He had unbounded confidence in Baree.  Together they could fight it out.  Within a week or two they would find the Girl.

And then...?

He looked at the picture a long time in the glow of the setting sun.

CHAPTER XVI

It was the week of the Big Festival when David and his half-breed arrived at Towaskook’s village.  Towaskook was the “farthest east” of the totem-worshippers, and each of his forty or fifty people reminded David of the devil chaser on the canvas of the Snow Fox’s tepee.  They were dressed up, as he remarked to the half-breed, “like fiends.”  On the day of David’s arrival Towaskook himself was disguised in a huge bear head from which protruded a pair of buffalo horns that had somehow drifted up there from the western prairies, and it was his special business to perform various antics about his totem pole for at least six hours between sunrise and sunset, chanting all the time most dolorous supplications to the squat monster who sat, grinning, at the top.  It was “the day of good hunting,” and Towaskook and his people worked themselves into exhaustion by the ardour of their prayers that the game of the mountains might walk right up to their tepee doors to be killed, thus necessitating the smallest possible physical exertion in its capture.  That night Towaskook visited David at his camp, a little up the river, to see what he could get out of the white man.  He was monstrously fat—­fat from laziness; and David wondered how he had managed to put in his hours of labour under the totem pole.  David sat in silence, trying to make out something from their gestures, as his half-breed, Jacques, and the old chief talked.