At last the rotting ice began to yield, and Andrew sat outside Watson's shack one day, watching an impressive spectacle. The river broke up with violence, the ice ripping and rending with a sound like the roar of artillery, and as the great torn masses swept away, the water pent up in the higher reaches poured into the gorge, swollen with melting snow. It rolled by in savage flood, laden with tremendous blocks of ice, some of which, cemented together near falls and rapids, were the size of small frame houses. Among them drove huge floes into which the floating cakes had solidified during the earlier frosts. Here and there one stranded upon a point, or swung in an eddy, until another crashed into it and both were shattered amid a bewildering uproar. Then, for a while, the stream was filled with massive, driving sheets of ice, which ground the banks with a tremendous din and scored the tops of projecting boulders, while waterlogged pines and stumps sunk in the river-bed were crushed to pulp. Andrew had never seen any display of natural forces to equal this, and when he went into the shack for supper he found that he could not get the recollection of it out of his mind. The lonely North is a savage country, very grim and terrible in some of its moods. Andrew, however, had carefully considered and endeavored to guard against its dangers, and when a canoe which had been especially built for him in Toronto arrived, he set out on his journey with Carnally and Graham. There was now no risk of frostbite and the gray trout would help out their food supply, but they knew the trip would cost them much exhausting labor. For some days they poled and paddled up the swollen river, spending hours in dragging the canoe and provisions across rocky portages to avoid furious rapids, and often wading waist-deep in icy water with the tracking line. At night they slept, generally wet through, among the stones, though there was often sharp frost and the slack along the bank was covered with fresh ice in the morning; but they made steady progress until the stream broke up into small forks and they must cross the height of land. This was singularly toilsome work. In some places they were forced to hew a path through scrub spruce bush; in others there were slippery rocks to be scrambled across, while two in turn carried the canoe, borne upside-down upon the shoulders. Then there were the provisions to be brought up, and in relaying them each difficult stage had to be traversed several times, so that once or twice, when they had made only a mile or two in an exhausting day, Andrew almost despaired of getting any farther.