As with the bear of the song —crossing a mountain to see what he could see— the rest of the day was uphill. First had been riffles that required the paddlers jump overboard and push. Then they had encountered roaring rapids. These were lined. A tow rope, which never seemed long enough to allow walking along the top of a cutbank cliff, was attached to the bow. Another line from the stern was used to maneuver around boulders and standing waves. It seemed to Jed whichever position he chose, was the wrong one; and that they always ended up on the wrong bank. Murphy's Law in Lining was that if you crossed the stream on an easy open bar, a cliff was around the next bend.

Finally they were forced to leave the stream and portage. Jed, still smarting from Jenny's ability to handle the difficult terrain better than he, decided to regain lost face by balancing the kayak on his shoulders, as noted from the drawings in his boyhood books on Indian and mountain man adventures. It only took a few moments for him to conclude that Redwing, and Hawkeye, had never tried to portage a 96 pound kayak over muskeg, where one step out of three meant falling off a grass tussock, or alternatively sinking to the knees through the moss covering over thawing permafrost.

Realizing that they had three miles of uphill drudgery ahead, where one mile was the equivalent of five on dry land, he finally decided to make the carry by breaking the folding boat down into packs, and make a relay of their supplies to the head of the Hootalinqua.

Their first round trip, other than the toil, was uneventful. On the second, just after breaking over the watershed divide, with heads bowed under their load, winded and too tired to whistle, they ran into a Toklat, the oversized Alaskan version of a cinnamon-colored grizzly. Thinking about this encounter, later, Jed was grateful he hadn't been carrying a handgun. In the surprise of this face-to-face meeting, he probably would have shot himself in the foot.

As it happened, in retrospect, he had enjoyed watching the beast stand on his hind legs, woof, and turn to run. In open terrain they were able to watch the powerful animal, with muscles rippling in poetic motion under a sleek coat, amble off with apparent ease at a pace, as best could be judged, equal to that of a galloping horse.

The day ended with a thoroughly miserable rain storm that drove them into the security of Jed's double wall, dome style mountain tent. There they stayed weathered-in for two days, waiting for the return of a sun whose existence became a matter of doubt.

Once Jed unzipped the floor opening, for the "kitchen," in the nylon "boat" floor, and fired up a small primus stove, and hung up his wet clothes to dry, they were fairly comfortable. With boiling water underway, so was a freeze-dried feast of Mountain House shrimp creole.