"Well, then you know how it is. While the water is below your knees you can stand it quite a while. When it gets along your thighs you begin to get cold. When it's waist deep, you chill mighty soon and can't stand it long--though Lewis stripped and dived in eight feet of water to get an otter he had shot. And slipping on wet rocks----" "Don't we know about that! We waded up the Rat River, on the Arctic Circle." "You did! You've traveled like that? Well, then you can tell what the men were standing here. They hadn't half clothes, a lot of them were sick with boils and 'tumers,' as Clark calls them. Some were nearly crippled. But in this water, ice water, waist deep, they had to get eight boats up that big creek yonder--beaver meadows all along, so they couldn't track. Sockets broke off their setting poles, so Captain Lewis, he ties on some fish gigs he'd brought along. One way or another, they got on up. "They now began to get short rations, too. At first they couldn't get any trout, or the whitefish--those fish with the 'long mouths' that Lewis tells about. I'll bet they never tried grasshoppers. But along above here they began to get fish, as the game got scarcer. Lewis tells of setting their net for them." "You certainly have been reading that little old _Journal_, Billy!" "Why shouldn't I? It's one great book, son. More I read it, the more I see how practical those men were. Now, those men were all fine rifle shots, and they'd go against anything, though along here there wasn't many grizzlies, and all of them shy, not bold like the buffalo grizzlies at the Falls. But they didn't hunt for sport--it was meat they wanted. Once in a while a snag of venison; antelope hard to get; no buffalo now, and very few elk; by now, even ducks and geese began to look good, and trout. "The ducks and geese and cranes were all through here--breeding grounds all along. That was molting time and they caught them in their hands. They killed beaver with the setting poles, and one day the men killed several otter with their tomahawks, though I doubt if they could eat otter. You see, as Clark's notes say, the beaver were here in thousands. I suppose when so big a party went splashing up the creek the beaver and otter would get scared and swim out to the main stream, and there some one would hit them over the head as they swam by." "One thing," said Jesse, "I don't think they flogged any of the men any more. I don't remember any since they left the Mandans."