Now each of these confident assertions was made with a mental reservation. I was really only a _potential_ writer on game protection, just as I was only a _potential_ ski-runner. I knew that I could write something about game protection, just as surely as I knew I could do something with the ski. As to just what I should write about game protection I was in some doubt, never having written about anything at all up to that time. Similarly, in the matter of the ski, never having seen a ski before. But I knew I could use them, for something, and hoped it would be as aids to linear progression over snow. Thanks to some previous experience with web snowshoes, I came through fairly well with the ski, but at the cost of many bumps and bruises and strained muscles. What it cost me to make good that game protection scribe boast would require some figuring. I recall that there was one old shark of an editor of a yellow-covered outdoor magazine in New York who quoted me advertising rates for the article I submitted him, but I believe we compromised by my taking twenty paid-in-advance subscriptions. Another editor sent me a bill for the cost of the cuts, and offered to include my own photograph--in evening clothes if desired--for five dollars extra. I still have several game protection articles on hand. It must have been sometime previous to the two or three weeks that I spent mushing about the valleys of the upper Yellowstone on the ice and snow that the idea came to me that it would be a nice thing to float down on the spring rise to the Missouri, the Mississippi and the Gulf. In any event, I knew that the thought came to me before arriving at the Park. I have a distinct recollection of pre-empting for my own use a big iron staple which some soldier had put in the mineral-charged water of Mammoth Hot Springs to acquire a frosty coating. I purposed driving it into the bow of my boat to bend the painter to. The boat I secured about ten miles down river from the Park boundary. The famous "Yankee Jim" gave it to me. This may sound generous on Jim's part, but seeing the boat didn't belong to him it wasn't especially so. Nor was the craft really a boat, either. It had been built by a coal miner from Aldridge, with the intention of using it to float down the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi to his childhood home in Hickman, Kentucky. It had done such strange things in the comparatively quiet ten-mile stretch below Gardiner that the miner abandoned it a good safe distance above "Yankee Jim's" Canyon, went back to Cinnabar and bought a ticket to Hickman by rail. I knocked the top-heavy house off the queer contraption, and in, under and round about the shell-like residue bumped and battered my way through the Canyon, and about twenty miles beyond. The last five miles were made astride of the only three remaining planks. I walked the ties the intervening fifteen miles to Livingston.