“’Twon’t be so good travelin’ here as on th’ Lake,” said David. “But I’m thinkin’ we’ll make un.”
David’s prediction was correct. In every turn of the river were deep drifts through which they floundered. Sometimes it became necessary to push the toboggan over these difficult places, using it as a support, working their way foot by foot. Slow and exhausting as it was, they stuck to it with a will, but when day broke they had traveled less than a third of the distance to the Halfway tilt.
“I’m fair scrammed!” Andy at length declared. “I’ve got t’ rest. Can’t we put on a fire and ’bide here and rest a little while?”
“Aye,” agreed David. “’Tis wearisome work. We’ll put on a fire and rest, but we mustn’t ’bide here too long. We’ll have t’ reach th’ tilt before night.”
An hour’s rest, sitting on the toboggan before a cheerful fire in the lee of the river bank, revived them.
“If we only had our snowshoes, and a bit t’ eat!” said Andy, when David suggested that it was time to go. “I’m fair starved!”
“And so be I!” David declared. “’Tis a long time since supper last evenin’. We’ll have th’ partridges, _what_ever, when we gets t’ th’ Halfway tilt.”
“It seems like I never can stand un so long,” said Andy. “I’m weak for hunger.”
Andy was to learn in the days that followed, what real hunger is, but he was brave enough, and not given to complaint. It is well, sometimes, for all of us to be tried out by the test of experience. Only through experience can we learn the stuff we are made of, and only through deprivations of the comforts to which we are accustomed can we learn to appreciate the good things of life. Most of us are too prone to take things for granted, and to forget that what we have and enjoy are the gifts of a benign Providence.
Many times that day David and Andy declared they “could not walk another step,” but they pushed and floundered bravely on until, in the dusk of evening, they stumbled at last into the friendly shelter of the Halfway tilt.
They were almost too weary to build a fire, but hunger conquered weariness, and presently with a roaring fire in the stove, and one of the partridges boiling--for, famished as they were, David insisted that the other one must be reserved for breakfast--they felt more cheerful. Fortunately they had left some tea in the tilt, and while their supper of half a boiled partridge each and a cup of tea was far from satisfying their healthy young appetites, it refreshed them.